OnMobile Global paid as much as 12 Million Euros (around $18.7 Million and Rs. 78.9 Crores) for French speech recognition company Telisma S.A. That’s an amount not too distant from the consolidated revenues that OnMobile has reported for the first quarter of this fiscal - Rs. 86.3 crores or $20.46 Million - and a fairly significant bet on the technology. Telisma has a speech recognition technology available in 10 Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, and English - and OnMobile plans to deploy it with operator clients over the next 2-3 years. Whats interesting is that the company signed a deal with Nasdaq listed Nuance for voice based search in 15 different languages.
With revenues of Rs. 86.3 crores, OnMobile has reported, on a consolidated basis, a net profit of Rs. 15.2 crores for the quarter ending June 30th 2008 (Q1-09); the EBITDA (excluding other income) is at Rs. 20.9 crore. The company says that margins are lower this fiscal, primarily due to payouts to VoxMobili shareholders. Also, they’ve adopted a revenue share business model for VoxMobili’s phone-backup service in Asia, instead of the previously adopted one time license, which brings in lower initial returns, but more long term revenues. Over 10 operators have signed up for the Phone Backup service.
Download: Financials | Release | Annual Report for 2007-08
On a standalone basis - OnMobile, excluding its subsidiaries - has seen revenues increase to Rs. 72.77 crores, up from Rs. 50.27 crores Q1-08, profits increase to Rs. 14.5 crores, from Rs. 11.88 crores in Q1-08
During the quarter:
– RBT: signed up with the largest operator in Nepal for Ringback Tone (RBT) deployment; Received Letter of Intent for RBT deployment with UAE operator; launched Ad supported Ring-back tones with an operator
– MSearch: voice based search launched with Vodafone, Reliance and Tata, generating 1 million searches a day
– SMS based search launched with one operator, and is generating 8000 searches a day
– Phone backup: received a Letter of Intent from an operator each in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
No mention, yet, of the story we had broken earlier this month:
– OnMobile Global Inks Exclusive Mobile Music Deals With Around 40 South Indian Labels
