Thanks, Fire Bull. I realised later that the obvious answer is yes, it will appear as an expense if it is one... But if anyone wants to read about it, Issue Number 17 on this link is a decent read:
http://www.iasplus.com/en/standards/ifrs/ifrs2
As for capitalising vs expensing development costs; in the previous half, they did not capitalise any development, even though we can see an increase in staff costs to build and market the Indonesian business.This is really evident in cash flows, where the Investor Presentation states
"Free Cash flow of Malaysian Ops $A 1.6m", in the face of negative cash outflows for the half of 2.3m.
As such, I don't see why they'd change their mind here and capitalise these particular services - especially for only $250k.
If I use this assumption and feed it into the EBITDA figure we're given of ~470k, one can assume underlying EBITDA for the quarter from this adjustment alone is 720k. And whilst an exact adjustment can't be made for the remainder of Indonesian/DataMorph spend, we can sensibly conclude that 720k is the quarterly EBITDA run-rate, with the remaining 1.5month contribution to be added from Arte Mobile.
Annualise this, and one can get EBITDA in the order of 2.8m, + another 6months of Arte Mobile to contribute... with an adjustment to be made for the additional expense occurred by investing in the Indonesian and DataMorph operations.
It's likely that my assumptions are the result of a confirmation bias, so take it all with a grain of salt. That said, other than the headline numbers, I see no dis-confirming evidence that I can focus in on. All reports of how operations are progressing, along with previous year's figures point to increased investment spend being expensed, rather than a collapse in margins/profits.
I guess only time will prove me right or wrong...
