KUALA LUMPUR: Mobile services enabler Sedania Innovator Bhd, which slipped into the red in the first half of the year, is confident of a brighter future after bagging a new contract and venturing into big data analytics (BDA).
“We have signed a new contract with U Mobile [Sdn Bhd],” said founder and managing director Datuk Noor Azrin Mohd Noor.
“And we have also identified a few quick wins of contracts for our new business segment, the BDA. We hope we can finalise something in the next few months,” he told The Edge Financial Daily.
Noor Azrin said that despite the current challenging times, the company is hopeful of a turnaround in the second half of the year ending Dec 31, 2016. (2HFY16)
For the second quarter ended Jun 30, 2016 (2QFY16), Sedania incurred a net loss of RM842,000, versus a net profit of RM114,000 a year ago, while revenue slid 8.79% to RM2.01 million from RM2.21 million for 2QFY15.
For 1HFY16, the group posted a net loss of RM1.62 million, against a net profit of RM1.61 million for 1HFY15. Revenue fell 20.74% to RM3.79 million from RM4.79 million.
Despite the poor showing, Sedania paid out an interim dividend of one sen.
Sedania, whose principal business activity is the provision of airtime credit sharing services to companies like Celcom Axiata, Maxis, Robi Axiata (Bangladesh) and U Mobile, was listed on Bursa Malaysia’s ACE Market in June last year.
As a technology firm, Noor Azrin said Sedania’s venture into BDA business shows that the management is not ignorant of the changing marketplace.
“Because when we pivoted it (BDA), a lot of our investors got excited because they knew that sharing the technology that we have was a tenbagger. But it has time attached to it, so it is an organic growth to us, [but] some of the investors were not as patient,” he said.
“We started to understand it after our listing, so we have to pivot and build more pillars as our revenue stream. BDA was one of the pillars that we have identified that is going to make Sedania jump to the next level,” he added.
In July this year, Sedania entered into a five-year exclusive partnership arrangement with US-based big data processing platform provider Cloudera Inc, with the aim of tapping the data analytics services market in Malaysia and the Asean region.
While it remains to be seen if Sedania has made the right move by venturing into BDA, Noor Azrin pointed out that in Malaysia, large corporations and government-linked companies have been longing for a way to derive value from substantial data both they collected and generated.
“After we partnered with Cloudera, we began to approach many potential clients and many of them told us that they have been wanting in these kinds of solutions. So we think that the partnership is quite timely for us to develop solutions to fill the need in the market,” he said.
According to Sedania, the BDA market in Malaysia alone is estimated to be worth US$80 million in 2018.
The company said the Asia-Pacific region is currently the third largest BDA market with a 14.5% market share, after the US and the European Union (EU). But both the US and EU markets are almost reaching a maturity stage while Asia-Pacific is still at its growth stage which represents a huge opportunity for Sedania to grow its BDA business, it added.
Last Friday, Sedania’s share price closed unchanged at 23 sen, giving the company a market capitalisation of RM46 million.
Year to date, the counter has fallen by 44% from 41 sen on Dec 31 last year. Sedania’s initial public offering issue price was 38 sen per share.