British startup Shazam has published its financial results for the year ending 30 June 2011, revealing a year-on-year revenue growth of 47.3%.
Shazam posted revenues of £15.6m for the year, up from £10.59m in the year ending 30 June 2010, according to its filing with Companies House in the UK. The company didn’t turn a profit for the year, although its net losses narrowed from £0.35m to £0.28m in the same period.
Shazam’s cost of sales for the year ending 30 June 2011 were just over £932k, up from £517k the year before. The company’s ‘recurring administrative expenses’ also increased from £10.5m to £14.83m in that time period.
“Shazam continues to consistently add new users at the rate of more than 1 million per week, and announced in April 2011 that total users were approaching 150 million worldwide,” explains the document. “The business is generating over 120 million requests every month.”
The company has already updated those figures in a February 2011 press release, saying it now has more than 175m users generating 6m tags a day with the company’s apps – around 180m requests a month. Shazam passed 100m users in December 2010, so its growth has continued.
During the year covered by the latest results, Shazam raised a $32m funding round – in June 2011 – led by VC firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Institutional Venture Partners.
As of 30 June 2011, Shazam had £18.71m cash at bank and in hand.
The latest financial results also reveal the price paid by Shazam to Broadcast Monitoring Inc in November 2011 for the intellectual property rights to its audio recognition technology.
The figure wasn’t announced at the time, but the new filing reveals Shazam paid $22.7m (around £14m) for “certain core IP” using a mixture of cash, issued shares and issued loan stock.
Shazam spent much of the calendar-year 2011 diversifying beyond its original music recognition business into the TV and advertising markets, particularly through partnerships with broadcasters and brands in the US.
The company says that half of the companies advertising around the US TV coverage of this season’s Super Bowl had Shazam-enabled their ads.
The economic benefits for Shazam won’t be known until February 2013, when it publishes its next set of annual results. However, the filing for the year ending 30 June 2011 strikes a confident note.
“The commercial environment is likely to remain competitive, but the directors are confident that Shazam will continue to successfully expand as a result of the skills and experience within the Group, an excellent product set and strong financial backing.”
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