Appen Ltd (ASX:APX) on Wednesday reported a full year underlying profit of $19.7 million, an 86% increase over the same period a year earlier.
Appen posted revenue of $166.6 million in the period. This was 50% higher than the same period last year. The company announced a fully franked final dividend of 3 cents per share, resulting in full year dividends of 6 cents, up 20% from last year.
The Appen Ltd share price has jumped $1.41 or 17.30% higher in Wednesday morning trade.
Appen is a global leader in the development of high-quality, human annotated datasets for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Appen brings over 20 years of experience collecting and enriching a wide variety of data types including speech, text, image and video.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Brayan said that the high growth of revenue and EBITDA benefitted from new customer acquisition, projects in multiple data formats such as text, audio, image and video and secure annotation work.
“In addition to new customer wins, we are seeing a richer variety of work in many data formats that add to our foundation speech and search projects,” Mr Brayan said.
Outlook
Appen is forecasting full year underlying EBITDA for the financial year 2018, ending December 31st 2018, in the range of $50 million – $55 million, suggesting growth of around 85%
The Appen Ltd share price has gained 15.40% since the beginning of the year, while the S&P/ASX 200 Index has fallen roughly 2.02%. The Appen share price has surged 231.83% in the last 12 months.
