OREANDA-NEWS.  Myriad Group AG (SIX Swiss Exchange: MYRN) today reported revenues of USD 40.2 million and a net profit of USD 8.1 million for the full year 2014.

Stephen Dunford, CEO of Myriad Group AG, commented: “2014 has been a very successful year and the first time Myriad has achieved profitability in its history. A number of achievements have contributed to the company’s performance - these include the conclusion of the major restructuring operation announced at the end of 2013, the resolution of a number of legacy legal cases and the strong performance of our Mobile Services and Device Solutions business units. We start 2015 with a solid foundation from which we can invest in the growth of our exciting product portfolio.”

2014 Financial Results in Brief

This year saw Myriad achieve a significant improvement in profitability, with adjusted gross profit of USD 27.7 million (FY2013: USD 19.9 million) and EBITDA (pre restructuring and exceptional costs) of USD 7.5 million (FY2013: loss of USD 2.9 million). These improvements were attributable to annualized cost savings in FY2014 of USD 20.5 million, which were attained through the completion of restructuring activities and operational efficiencies achieved in the year.

Licence revenues from the Device Solutions Division saw a significant increase to USD 15.0 million in 2014 (FY2013: USD 10.9 million), while overall revenue was down slightly in FY2014 to USD 40.2 million (FY2013: USD 43.2 million). This decrease is attributable to a decline in Mobile Services Division revenue, as legacy messaging services that typically charged operators a per user licence fee were replaced with the new msngr OTT service.

2014 Achievements

Myriad launched a new instant messaging service hosted in the cloud, providing a unique social environment based around entertaining content that is fueling conversations between users. The new service brings added functionality to further develop user engagement around group chat, enabling users to share content quickly and easily.

In December, Myriad launched a sponsored content channel program to simultaneously provide msngr users with a rich and engaging experience, while offering msngr the ability to monetize the service.

With the initial focus on Latin America, launch partners have included; Yahoo, Sony Music, Sony Pictures, Universal Music, Warner Music, Cin?polis and Grupo Formula. Currently, over 40 Spanish language channels are operating in Mexico and 4 are operating in the Central America region. Myriad plans to launch additional Spanish and Portuguese channels throughout Latin America in the first half of 2015.

The Myriad Sub Data service, focused on basic and feature phone users in emerging markets, has seen increased engagement with new services launched in Morocco, Brazil and Mexico increasing our addressable market by 400%. The service delivers social media through a text-based interface for feature phone users who do not have a data plan. In addition, we are Facebook’s partner of choice for USSD services with 24 live deployments with operators across Latin America, Africa, India and South-East Asia.

The breadth of value added services offered over USSD has been further enhanced with the announcement of Myriad as a certified partner with Twitter and the only Yahoo! partner to deliver services to basic and feature phones in emerging markets.

Myriad settled litigation with Oracle that related to certain technology in the Device Solutions Division, which should serve to eliminate any hesitation in the marketplace with respect to the purchase of these products.

After having successfully deployed our products in millions of Comcast set-top boxes developed by a variety of OEM vendors, in 2014 Myriad’s Jbed Java™ Virtual Machine was selected as a component of the RDK-2 platform by RDK Management LLC (a joint venture between Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Liberty Global). Because of its ability to operate in both U.S. and European based systems, RDK-2 is expected to become a worldwide standard for next generation cable set-top boxes, with Myriad’s Jbed product as the de facto standard Java™ Virtual Machine in those boxes.

Managing Costs

The extensive restructuring projects completed in FY2014 resulted in significant cost reductions and has helped the underlying business return to a sustainable level. We continue to invest in research and development, marketing and sales to support the Group’s key messaging products, msngr and Sub Data. In particular, we intend to invest significantly in msngr in order to drive further user growth in Latin America and to expand into other geographic regions.

Outlook 2015

2014 included non-repeatable legacy revenues, msngr user fees and a large one-time transaction in our Device Solutions Division. In view of this we believe it is unlikely that 2015 revenues will be as high as 2014 revenues. However, this should be seen in the context that we expect to have msngr revenue streams activated in the second half of 2015, which will return us to revenue growth in 2016. Furthermore, our ability to be profitable in 2015 will be impacted by our investment in msngr, something we will believe will be vital to drive shareholder value.

About Myriad

Myriad delivers consumer applications, messaging solutions, and embedded software to leading OEMs, mobile operators, and pay TV providers worldwide. Our messaging services deliver instant messaging and social networking to hundreds of millions of users in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Working with some of the world’s most successful mobile phone operators, Myriad’s market leading chat application, msngr, enables consumers to connect to friends and family for free across feature phones as well as smartphones. Our Updates service, provided over USSD through our collaboration with Facebook and Twitter enables users without data plans to connect to the social networks and chat services they want to reach in a simple and affordable way. In many cases, Myriad’s services are providing users with their first experience of the Internet.