AVEVA today announced that revenue for the year ended March 31, 2011 grew 17% to a record £174 million, with strong performance in the oil and gas vertical and in Asia. Three percent of growth came from acquisitions (ADB and Logimatic’s MARS business last June), which contributed £5.6 million to revenue in fiscal 2011. Even though these acquisitions themselves had an adjusted pre-tax loss of £1 million, AVEVA as a whole reported an adjusted pre-tax profit of £55 million, up 8% over fiscal 2010.
The details:
• Total revenue was £174 million, up 17% from a year ago and above the top end of the range the analysts seem to have been expecting. (AVEVA’s share had taken a beating on the London Stock Exchange on fears that its plant design products would be affected by a slow-down in activity in the nuclear energy sector following the crisis in Japan, but the company says that this has not happened to date.)
• Software revenue was £158 million, up 14%. Perpetual model sales rebounded some, as initial license fees were up 17% to £41 million. Tribon, the acquired marine design product, had historically been sold this way and this model remains a preference in some markets; however, initial license fees are not yet back to pre-recession levels.
• Services revenue was £16 million, up 60% (but this includes £4 million in revenue from acquisitions — organic growth was still a solid 20%).
• On a geographic basis, EMEA remains the company’s largest region. EMEA accounts for 66% of revenue and grew 4% on an organic basis. FY2011 was a record year for EMEA, as the second half of fiscal 2011 showed signs of economic recovery, with growth in Russia, Eastern Europe and the UK driven by oil and gas sector.
• Asia Pacific was 38% of total revenue in 2011, up 30% on an organic basis, with the company reporting strong growth in China, Korea and India.
• Finally, the Americas accounted for 18% of total revenue and increased 7% organically. In FY2011, revenue from Latin America grew in excess of 20% and now represents half of revenue from the region. AVEVA singled out strong performance in Brazil but reports that conditions in North America “remain tough”.
• There was a slight shift in the revenue mix from AVEVA’s end-user markets in FY2011, with oil and gas now representing 45% of the business as the marine markets remains stuck in the doldrums; marine now accounts for 25% of AVEVA’s revenue, while power is 15%.
• AVEVA ramped up investment in R&D by 34% over last year to £28 million or 16% of revenue. The company says this is in part due to the build-out of AVEVA NET.
AVEVA does not provide forward-looking guidance but did say that its focus on high growth markets, growing its sales capacity in BRIC countries and its AVEVA NET product, which drives usage beyond the design department, make it optimistic about fiscal 2012. Analysts in the UK seem to have settled on a revenue target of £185 million, which would be an increase of 6%. That feels low to me; I would anticipate a growth rate closer to 12% to 14%, assuming a continued recovery and no stalls in the nuclear power plant market.
As I was looking for the analyst consensus for fiscal 2012, I came across an unusual nugget: I don’t usually pay much attention to market cap, but today AVEVA is worth right around $1 billion. How cool is that?