Couldn't the same be said about Arrium Snoop? ;-)
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Santiago - the $200m plus comparison is $121m last year - up 65%
Arrium is more or less the complete opposite of Xero. Arrium is a mature/declining business. Xero is an unprofitable start up. Arrium is entirely focussed on improving cashflows: restructuring to save cash (and ultimately bank cash), selling surplus assets to raise cash and all under the watchful eye of experienced bankers. Xero has no bankers to be accountable to, a policy of spending cash and then spending more cash.
Xero is in the planting stage: spending money to seed new technology for future growth. Arrium is in the harvesting stage: Lots of money spent, now digging up the rewards. In fact so much money has been spent at Arrium that they are now in a position where they are making losses, yet still generating cash to retire debt, so good is the cashflow. Arrium is a classic Ben Graham investment where you can buy assets on market at a substantial discount to book value. For Xero you have to pay a substantial premium to book value.
The strong positive cashflow available from Arrium is IMO, the reason that Arrium is an investment while Xero, without even a plan to have positive cashflow, is not.
SNOOPY
Hmmm, Ms Crone showed 2 slides with NZ numbers. The first showed NZ subscribers at 100,000, and she then showed the slide of 150,000 as of 'today' - 22 July- and said numbers had just tipped over the 150,000 level. Hence the update, for the NZ audience of shareholders.
I didn't notice the date on the first slide (100,000) but she definitely said 50,000 new NZ subscribers in the past 10 weeks.
I'm pretty sure the slide of NZ subscribers said 138,000 before increasing to 150+. That would tie in the with FY15 figures that were released.
Also, the 50,000 new subscribers relates to total subscribers. It was shown on the slide showing that they were now at 540k, and gained 50k in the first 4 years, and then gained 50k in the last 10 weeks.
NZ isn't growing much any more so it doesn't make sense for 50k in growth to be coming from NZ.
The slides are available here https://www.nzx.com/files/attachments/217158.pdf
I beg to differ. Off a small base of subscribers compared to intuits millions + their massive marketing budget - I would say Xero's growth percentages are excellent! Xero do very little advertising from what I understand (per media article) - if word of mouth/organic growth are driving this puppy then watch out - the next year or two could go ballistic.
Furthermore, Xero are literally pouring cash into product development a couple of years in advance of release, while building massive international partners - they aren't going to be a "cloud accounting system" shortly - they will be a one stop "cloud business solution". While Intuit are far ahead in customer numbers at this point, they are playing catchups re prodcut development - bigtime. Xero haven't made a dent yet in Intuits customer base YET but i expect they will be migrating soon enough - en masse.
If 50,000 new subscribers in NZ in the past 10 weeks is true then somebody is telling porkies
Either the 138,000 reported at March reports is wrong or the 150,000 as 'of today' is wrong
If both are correct than only 12,000+new subscribers from March year end to 'today' (4 months)
Rod said - "I wish we'd kept all the money we raised in US dollars, but that wasn't our treasury policy," he said, reflecting on a 25 percent fall in the New Zealand dollar exchange rate against the US dollar in the last year, during which the company raised a total of $147.2 million from two US private equity investment funds.
No update from Chris when he fronted for the Australian market. And since it's really going well on that part of the world, I think they're reserving something big for the Melbourne Xerocon. Even their customer retention period of 93 months (check it yourself) is better than the overall Group. It's really looking nice I say.