Poynt is easily one of the best BlackBerry apps ever built and we love writing about it. What we also love about Poynt is that it’s a public corporation so their financials are available to anyone who cares to do a little digging. The mobile industry is hot right now and Poynt serves as an interesting case study about what it takes to grow a large mobile company and how profitable a free app with purely advertising-based revenues can be.
Today marks a pretty big news day for Poynt as the app/company has surpassed more than 8.5 million unique users at the end of June 2011 across North America, Western Europe and Australia, after reaching 3.2 million at the end of June 2010. Of the over 700,000+ new users added in June 2011, 500,000+ were on the Android platform. Existing preloads contributed to over 300,000+ of these Android users in the month of June. So far in July, the average number of new daily users added has exceeded 25,000, putting the Company on track for another record month. Currently, Poynt has over 9.0 million unique users.
Here are the numbers Poynt would like us to focus on:
The last financials posted on Poynt’s site were the Q3 2010 Financial Statements. We should be seeing new filings coming soon but we can see the sort of cost it takes to get to almost 10 million users and the revenue one might expect.
Obviously as Poynt grows its user base, it’s also growing as a company. Traditionally, mobile companies are pretty lean but Poynt seems to be fairly heavy in terms of management and operating costs. Salary and consulting fees increased by $619,702 or 132% in 2010 compared to the same period in 2009. Another area where Poynt differs from a typical mobile company is in advertising. Most app companies will rely on the app stores and manufacturers for promotion, with some blog and inexpensive community outreach. Poynt on the other hand, has advertising and promotion expenses that increased by $692,932 (789%). Overall, a company like Poynt is cash intensive to operate. For the three months ended September 30, 2010, the Company used $1,388,590 (2009 – $2,594,534) cash in operating activities.
Revenue for Poynt has increased but it doesn’t come close to covering their expenses. Sales and licensing revenues for the nine months ended September 30, 2010 increased by 172% to $605,092 from $222,760 for the same period in 2009.
It should be interesting to see what the latest financials for Poynt bring but it would be surprising if revenues ever come close to covering expenses. Perhaps the lean, startup-style mobile company is the only way to truly be profitable in this industry.
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