YouGov Grows Revenue, Readies New Data Product

Online research specialist YouGov has reported preliminary results for the year ended 31st July 2014, with revenue up 10% in constant currency terms, to £67.4m, and adjusted profit before tax rising 12%.

Adjusted operating profit rose 24%, and adjusted EPS 11%. While the group's custom research revenue crept up just 1% to £47.7m, its other, 'Data Products and Services' grew 30%, with BrandIndex up 53% to £8.0m and Omnibus revenue up 20% to £8.8m.

CEO Stephan Shakespeare said of the results and developments: 'We're delivering what we set out to at the beginning of the year. Data products and services are growing well, with the profit contribution from these higher margin businesses matching custom research for the first time. Our geographies are performing to plan and we have continued to expand our footprint, allowing us to continue to leverage our products internationally... We have started the current year well and the Board remains confident in YouGov's ability to continue to deliver upon its strategy going forwards.'

YouGov now has 24 offices in 16 countries and operates panels in 33 countries, with an Indonesian operation added in September 2014 to existing Asian bases in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. The UK and Middle East, with revenue up 11% to£19.4m and 38% to £10.1m respectively, were the star performers this year. In the US, revenue rose 5% to £21.9m; in Germany it fell 5% to £8.9m and in the Nordic region 6% to £8.0m, while the fledgling operation in France saw a healthy initial rise from £0.3m to £0.8m. YouGov says it is moving away from regional reporting of results to a product-focused system, reflecting its policy of developing consistent global products and services.

The firm says it will focus on growth in sales, client service and analytics skills in the coming year, in order to 'drive revenues from data products and services and from custom research that integrates with the data generated from our panel.'

From next month, this will include the media planning and audience segmentation tool YouGov Profiles, the UK version of which will be based initially on a database of around 120,000 separate data points on consumers, from c.190,000 YouGov panellists. The service will connect such disparate data sources as brand usage and perception scores for c.1,000 brands, TV viewing for 5,000 programmes, website usage for the most active commercial websites, plus digital and social behavioural data. Subscribing clients will access the data through a dedicated portal with a point and click interface and a number of options for analysis. The UK launch will be followed by rollouts in the USA and Germany over the next 9 months.

As part of a more general drive to integrate its custom research with syndicated data, the company will make increasing reference to its 'highly structured and codified' profile data library, known as the 'YouGov Cube', with the possible contribution of the Cube considered each time a project is developed, thus 'minimising the extent to which additional data collection is required through custom surveys'.

Web site: www.yougov.com .