Geodesic Ltd, formerly Geodesic Information Systems Ltd, has been an innovator in software products focused on information, communication, and entertainment for mobile phones and desktop computers.
It offers applications under the brand name 'Mundu' for retail segment and is also the owner of Chandamama, the library of 15,000 exclusive stories. The company has offices in Mumbai and Bangalore in India, Silicon Valley in the US, Sweden, Germany and UK in Europe besides Hong Kong. It also has presence in South American and African markets through new acquisitions.
Business: Geodesic offers communication and collaboration solutions. It provides innovative front-end applications, the Mundu suites of products. Mundu instant messaging (IM), (voice-over-internet protocol) Mundu speak, Mundu Radio, Montage, etc. Mundu Radio technology is used by Idea Cellular's 'Idea Radio' and Geodesic also has technology allowing live TV on mobile handsets.
Investment rationale: Geodesic provides communication and information platform for retail and enterprise segment. The hardware platform gained by the takeover of Picopeta has been used to develop a product called Geo Amida, which is being marketed to government and private sectors and revenues from the hardware platform will start accruing this year.
Geodesic successfully launched the world's first interoperable IM application on the Android mobile platform as a personal IM tool. This allows people not available on Yahoo, MSN, Google, etc, to send SMS through Mundu IM at 15 paisa per message.
Concerns: The retail subscription revenues depend on mobile phone internet access and data plan subscriptions and also the ability of Geodesic to reach users. Any inability to do so can impact revenues.
Valuations: Geodesic reported a consolidated topline of Rs 642.94 crore in FY09, a whopping 103.18% jump over Rs 316.44 crore in FY08. Net profit at Rs 282.84 crore grew a handsome 90% from Rs 148.63 crore last year.
However, growing marketing costs (315%) and other expenditures (195%) dented operating margins by 681 bps and profit margins too suffered 298 bps. The company should be able to sustain growth of 35-40%. Geodesic has a strong balance sheet with Rs 380 crore of cash, part of which was used to buy back $8.5 million outstanding FCCBs
0 comments:
Post a Comment