Customer Update 29 May, 2006
Message from CEO, Ray Anderson
We are coming up to the first anniversary of our debut on the London Stock Exchange AIM, when we raised funds to invest in expanding our business to better support the growth of our content providers and partners. This week also saw the availability of the 4th generation bango.com website. Now is a good point to update you on progress over the past year and outline some of our directions for the future.
Strengthening Bango as a platform for your business
During the year we continued to add significant new features and functions to the Bango platform to enable you to offer a better user experience and reduce the costs of doing business on the mobile internet.
As our last update described, we are continuing to integrate with many new billing providers to increase the efficiency of Bango in maximising your revenues and profitability. Last year, PayPal chose to partner with Bango to expand its reach into mobile content. Cingular Wireless, the largest mobile operator in the USA, selected Bango as its first move in opening up its billing system to enable payment for content through the internet. We also announced unique relationships with Orange, O2, Proximus and Telefonica. We expect many further relationships in the coming years, the benefits of which will be automatically provided to you and your customers.
Boosting traffic
We enhanced the Bango platform to increased the traffic to your mobile sites by providing information to mobile search companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. The promotion of content through mobile search engines will become an important driver of end user activity in the coming years and it is an area where we see good opportunities to help you grow your business.
Scalable and reliable
The Bango platform reliably handles a high volume of transactions. In
March 2006 the system processed in excess of 40 million mobile
transactions across 22,000 different WAP gateways. We saw 361,218
first-time users and 1,266 different device types. With these volumes
constantly increasing, scalability is key and our development team has
made good progress increasing the capacity of the Bango system to stay
ahead of demand, while ensuring we maintain the reliability of our
systems which perform a vital role for you.
An expanding customer base
Bango customers range from global brands such as Manchester United Football Club, EMI, WWE, Sony BMG and News International through smaller brands such as Ministry of Sound, Codemasters, The National Portrait Gallery and Funkimobiles to individuals running small businesses. They cover a wide range of sectors, including music, sports, print media, broadcasting, erotic, games and phone personalization. During the year we have significantly grown our customer base.
Bango partners
Building your mobile site has never been easier. To ensure you have the best overall solution, Bango has created the Bango Accredited Partner (BAP) programme which provides technical support, specialist interfaces and advance information to enable companies designing, building and hosting mobile internet sites to better integrate the Bango Service with their offerings. There are now more than 20 great partners including Blue Star Mobile, Volantis, Graphico, Entriq, July Systems and Crisp Wireless that can help you achieve your goals.
A strong financial performance
The past financial year was a good one for Bango. With sales of £7.5 million our year-on-year sales growth increased from 65% to 121%. During the year we had a very successful IPO which raised over £6 million to fund our expansion. We have already increased our investment in the Bango platform by £1.5 million. We are very well financed to support our ambitious growth and product plans.
Giving you Global reach
During the year we started investing in establishing regional sales and support teams, modelled after our successful UK operations. The mobile internet is global. Our offices in Cambridge, New York, California, Madrid and Cologne are there to help you expand your business from wherever you are based to consumers all round the world.
Supporting your growth in the year ahead
In FY 2007 we will continue our product development to enable you to grow your business and leverage new billing opportunities world-wide. We will focus on giving maximum support to our Bango Accredited Partners to enable them to use the Bango platform to attract and assist customers who want to market direct to consumer across any mobile operator network. We will also work hard to increase the number of users who visit Bango enabled sites like yours by partnering with mobile search and advertising companies and by encouraging community activity between end users and the use of the mobile internet in general.
We are encouraged by the pace at which content providers are joining Bango in all territories. We have established a strong and scalable business by empowering content providers like you to do what you do best while we deal with the hassles and open up the market.
I would like to express my gratitude to you for your continued support. Working with mobile operators, content providers and partners we look forward to driving your continuing success in the coming years.
Regards
Ray Anderson, CEO at Bango
Directory auctions now open!
The next round of Directory auctions is now open and live bidding starts tomorrow (Tuesday):
Position 1 - 30/05/06 3pm GMT
Position 2 - 31/05/06 3pm GMT
Position 3 - 01/06/06 3pm GMT
Position 4 - 02/06/06 3pm GMT
Click here to log on and start bidding
Explanation of Sales figures
If you have permission to see the sales figures for your packages, these are shown above. Please note that these figures are total sales for your content. If you don't have any sales figures in the email, then the person who set up the Bango package has not given you permission to see this data.
To view past customer updates, click here
