The ASX 200 (ASX: XJO) is up 0.5% right now as reporting season enters its final stages.
Appen Ltd (ASX: APX) disappoints
The Appen share price is down 11% after reporting its FY20 half year result.
FY20 half year revenue grew by 25% to $306.2 million. The company said there was a substantial increase in annual contract value (ACV) to US$103 million. Appen also announced an enterprise-wide platform agreement with a major customer – this includes a US$80 million annual commitment.
Appen said four of five major customers are using the Appen annotation platform (formerly called the Figure Eight platform).
Underlying EBITDA (click here to learn what EBITDA means) went up 6% to $49.1 million. Excluding ‘growth investments’, underlying EBITDA rose 35% to $62.5 million.
Underlying net profit after tax (NPAT) declined by 3% to $28.9 million (down 12% in constant currency) and statutory net profit grew 20% to $22.3 million.
The Appen board decided to declare an interim dividend of 4.5 cents per share, up 12.5% from last year.
It’s maintaining its guidance for underlying EBITDA for the year to be between $125 million to $130 million. Year to date revenue plus orders in hand for delivery in FY20 was around US$475 million at August 2020. The full year underlying EBITDA margin is expected to be in the high teen percentages.
Zip Co Ltd (ASX: Z1P) drops
The Zip share price is down 7% after reporting its FY20 result.
It has been a big week for Zip after reporting QuadPay’s update and then revealing the launch of Zip Business with eBay Australia.
Today Zip announced its FY20 report which showed full year revenue jumped 91% to $161 million. This was helped by the 87% growth of transaction volume to $2.1 billion. Its loan book (receivables) also increased by 73% to $1.18 billion.
Gross profit rose by 68% to $51.6 million. The company said it delivered positive cash earnings before tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBTDA) while investing for growth. However, the net loss worsened by 80% to $20 million.
Zip said there are now 2.1 million customers (up 63%) and 24,500 merchants (up 51%) on the Zip platform.
Woolworths Group Ltd (ASX: WOW)
In FY20, Woolworths said that its group sales increased by 8.1% to $63.7 billion with online sales jumping by 41.8% to $3.5 billion.
However, the closure of its Hotels segment, higher customer costs and higher team safety costs caused group EBIT (click here to learn what EBIT means) to fall by 0.4%.
Woolworths’ underlying net profit dropped by 1.2% to $1.6 billion – this measure has been ‘normalised’ because last year was a 53 week period and this year includes lease account AASB 16 changes. However, Woolworths’ net profit after significant items fell 56.7% to $1.165 billion.
In the first eight weeks of FY21, Woolworths has seen total sales growth of 12.4% with 12% growth from its Australian supermarkets.
The company has started off well, but the rest of the year is difficult to predict. But Woolworths is expecting elevated buying for the rest of the first half of FY21.
The Woolworths share price is up around 3%.
Other reports
There have been plenty of other reports released today which the team at Rask Media have covered.
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