I missed your modded post, but glad to hear you'll be giving FRX a crack. I suspect you'll be pairing it with an excellent Visual Voicemail service or perhaps a worldly phone?
I'd be interested to know where you are travelling, and for example why you wouldn't choose say $10/day offer from Telstra/Optus/Voda?
Downloads rates are looking pretty exciting to me. I was going to wait until the end of quarter to perform an in depth analysis, but broadly speaking AppAnnie shows:
iOS: Regularly ranking 50-60 Top 1000 countries this quarter compared with ~40 last quarter
Android: Regularly ranking 20-30 Top 1000 countries this quarter compared with 10-20 last quarter
Of course its far more important to rank in the few important countries vs the many meaningless ones. I'm encouraged that all time high rankings have been achieved this quarter for China & UK (in Android) & Japan (in iOS & Android).
The Android rankings haven't been as important in revenue terms historically, but there appears to be a clear uptrend since early February in most European nations & China. Japan has also been ranking higher, although the trend in Japan began last year when they added Japanese language.
It's probably a bit early to call anything in IOS for UK or China, although the early signs of a trend are there. Japan is now regularly ranking in the Top 500.
Against the above, it seems that rankings have been relatively flat in Brazil & UAE (4th & 5th in revenue terms according to previous HY report).
Contrasting with disco's dismissal of the MAS deal, there appears to be a clear link between the launch of the inflight distribution of FRX SIMs by Malaysian Airways in early Jan, and a significant increase in iOS downloads in Malaysia. FRX has even been ranking in the overall section of the app store for almost the entire of March.
Last quarter FRX added 13k paying customers (for 84k total) on about 22k new downloads (for 191k total).
They should have passed 200k downloads by now (unsure if this would be deemed announcement worthy, even on social media). If they have a good quarter they may even hit the 100k customer milestone.
The March quarter marks the end of the financial for FRX, so in addition to the 4C, we'll get to a more granular breakdown of the revenue performance of each regional segment. I'll be expecting massive growth (possibly quadruple digit) in Europe.
With the above said, seasonally this is the worst quarter for FRX's cashflow. It will be interesting to see if they can maintain receipts at Dec quarter levels. Last year consumer receipts dropped ~25% (by my calculations).
(20min delay)
