Integrated Research under the Microscope: Tech player predicts record revenue, PAT in FY20

Summary

• ASX-listed technology player Integrated Research Limited was under the spotlight today as it announced its expected results for FY20 – best-ever revenue and profit after tax numbers predicted by the Company.
• IRI’s market release related to FY2020 profit guidance in the range of A$23.6 to A$24.2 million, helped the shared move up by over 3% on the ASX today, 17 July.
• The Company launched Payments Analytics to allows retailers, merchants, & payment processors to discover actionable insights and intelligence in real-time.
• Launched Prognosis platform which allows new Prognosis cloud services to work effortlessly with Prognosis software.
• IRI had strong business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place during COVID-19 pandemic.

Sydney-headquartered Integrated Research Limited (ASX:IRI) is engaged in providing performance management solutions for collaboration systems and payments operations. The Company generates value via a real-time, scalable hybrid cloud platform coupled with IRI’s rich domain expertise. Integrated Research enhance tasks of mission-critical systems and offers a unique user experience via smart, actionable insights.

IRI shares have been under discussion regularly as the Company has provided its investors with impressive returns since its ASX debut in 2000. In the last ten years, the IRI stock has delivered a return of ~899%. Integrated Research has had a decent performance even in these times of high volatility with returns 33.45% and 28.15% in the last three and six months, respectively.

At the end of today’s trading session, IRI shares settled at A$4.00, up ~3.36% from the previous close and were close to the 52-week high price. IRI has a market cap of A$665.1 million, with nearly 171.86 million outstanding shares.

The rise in the share price was primarily due to the Company’s announcement concerning the profit guidance for FY2020. IRI highlighted that while it is in the early stage of preparation of FY2020 financial statements, the Company projects record revenue and profit for the period based on the internal management accounts plus the internal audit.

IRI predicts that its total revenue would be in the range A$109.5 million - A$111 million, representing a growth in the 9% - 10% range. The net profit after tax is expected to range from A$23.6 million to A$24.2 million, indicating a growth of 8% to 10%.

Licence sales are anticipated between A$70.8 million to A$72.3 million. The growth in the sales would be between 13% to 15%, driven by the Company’s Unified Communications product line.

What has supported IRI shares to generate significant returns in volatile times?

The IRI stock has done considerably well in 2020 so far despite stock market struggle during the period due to the impact of the pandemic. While the Company is not entirely immune to the happenings around the globe and suffered during the massive sell-off towards the end of March, the stock has rallied and performed exceptionally well given the market scenario.

In June 2020, the Company made two big announcements which include the start of Payments Analytics and Prognosis platform. These details of the same are below.

Launch of Payments Analytics:

On 24 June 2020, Integrated Research Limited announced the launch of a new innovative cloud-based payments assurance solution known as Payments Analytics. Payments Analytics is the first product in the IR Transact solution suite. Payments Analytics allows retailers, merchants, & payment processors to discover actionable insights and intelligence in real-time.

Integrated Research believes that Payments Analytics is a huge step taken towards its data-driven intelligence strategy. It will enable its customers to benchmark performance against their industry, look for the pattern and leverage data in new and meaningful approaches throughout their business.

In the field of card payments, Payments Analytics can interact with massive payments data with ease and helps businesses to unlock understandings to drive more informed, profitable business judgments.

Launch of Next Generation Prognosis Platform:

On 17 June 2020, the Company announced the launch of next-generation Prognosis platform, extending into the cloud.

The cloud platform and hybrid architecture allow new Prognosis cloud services to work effortlessly with Prognosis software. The software enables the delivery of more comprehensive real-time insights and analytics from the massive data which is gathered every day by mission-critical systems.

Another advantage of this platform is that it is built with the state-of-the-art data collection, analysis and visualization technologies with innovations will accelerate the delivery of new capabilities to customers. It would further help in expanding into the new markets.

The launch of the cloud platform would allow greater innovation, faster deployment and better agility to deliver constant improvements and increased value to clients.

The Company also updated that there are multiple new solutions which are under the development phase and can deliver performance management & data analytics capabilities for cloud collaboration platforms & financial transaction systems.

IRI’s COVID-19 Response

In a market release related to COVID-19 response provided by the Company on 18 March 2020, IRI confirmed that it had strong business continuity and disaster recovery plan which gets activated in case of any significant business disruption such as COVID-19.

The Company understands the critical nature of being able to carry on operations amid sudden incidents. Hence these business continuity plans helped the Company to maintain its operations and give constant support to its client’s business-critical areas and systems.

IRI was continuously in touch with all its staff globally. These include those people who were working from the client and partner sites.

The Company also followed the government guidance on best practice and allowed its staff to work from the remote location. IRI also confirmed that it continued to function with high capacity, giving support to the clients and partners.