Bango is unable to disclose information about the sales of our customers, but a small Blackberry App seller has published a Blog entry here.

According to EBSCER: “Use of carrier billing has increased for the 14th straight month. September saw the use of carrier billing increase to 41.3% of all sales.”  and looking at the graph he provides it is easy to see that the share of billing via carrier (Mobile Operator) – which is powered by Bango – is accelerating fast.

Where sales in territories are currently restricted to paypal or credit card
only, significant additional revenue is anticipated with the addition of carrier
billing.

Ray

Mike showed a slide to outline the key capabilities of App World 3.0, which has just started to be deployed to Blackberry users.  Alongside the enhanced merchandizing and discovery features of BBAW, the importance of Carrier Billing was mentioned, and the  fact that Carrier Billing (which is powered by Bango) was now live in TEN countries.

Bango started enabling Carrier Billing for BBAW in August 2010, going live with AT&T Wireless.  Recent progress has been brisk, and the announcement of 10 countries rolled our already demostrated Bango’s progress over the past year.

With BBAW deployed in 131 markets world-wide, there is still a huge opportunity for further carrier billing activity, and Bango is working hard to deliver this as fast as possible to generate more sales for Blackberry App World vendors and to improve the user experience on Blackberry devices.

Click here to order a printed copy of the Bango 2011 Annual Report.

The Company’s AGM will be held at 2pm on Monday 19th September 2011 at the offices of Threadneedle Communications, Aldermary House, 10-15 Queen Street, London, EC1N 1TX.

View the 2011 AGM notice, 2011 AGM notice Explanatory notes

App Stores enable the download of free apps or “paid for” apps. Bango gets a small share of revenues from each payment transaction, so it is important to get some idea of the scale of the opportunity to see what returns might be available from this market, and important area for Bango in the coming years.

Vendors are highly secretive of the sales of Apps though their app stores. Apple, Nokia, Blackberry, Google, Amazon and many others have so far not revealed any financial details.  However, independent analysts have started to investigate the market, and are starting to publish their estimates.

iSuppli has recently pubplished its 2010 numbers  and there is a useful breakdown by vendor here at BGR

Bango will be preparing a roundup of some of the numbers, with a commentary later this year.

Mastercard/Nokia Visa Isis(Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile/Discover) Sprint  Google PayPal

Mobile Wallets enable users to store financial credentials – like credit card details, bank account access codes and potentially some “stored value”.  Just like a real wallet might hold your credit cards, a secretly scribbled password for your bank account, and some cash.

Unlike a real wallet, your mobile  wallet can connect to the internet – possibly helping with security, and thru technologies like bar codes, cameras, accelerometers, and NFC it is possible for the wallet to reveal its contents and authenticate to a “merchant” without having to use a swipe card or chip and pin.

Bango enables mobile web pages or downloaded apps to collect payment from users – normally through their mobile operator (who then collects the payment) or a credit or debit card.

Bango has already integrated into the PayPal mobile wallet, which is starting to become more popular.  In the same way, a wallet holding credit cards, bank access credentials or a pre-pay can also be accessed by Bango – through the phone.  The app or website using Bango does not have to integrate into all the different possible mobile wallet standards (at our last count there were at least 38) or find out which wallet the user has, they can leave all that to Bango.  Bango can identify the available wallet, and connect to the most popular wallets – collecting payments. Just like Bango does with 50+ carrier billing systems.

So, if wallets become more popular, and are able to support apps and web access, Bango and Bango customers will be able to benefit.

Bango expects that wallets will continue to be in relatively small niches initially, until more standards develop. The technology – NFC, barcode, bumping, bluetooth etc. – will evolve at the same time.  Bango expects that within 5-6 years, most mobiles will be “NFC equipped” and therefore able to easily replace smartcards such as Oyster – driving mass adoption.

In Japan, the adoption of mobile wallets is more advanced – primarily because the largest mobile phone company – DoCoMo has been driving this for many years.  There is a great video about the “FELICA” system here.

Click here to order a printed copy of the Bango 2010 Annual Report.

The Company’s AGM will be held at 2pm on Friday 24 September 2010 at the offices of Threadneedle Communications, Aldermary House, 10-15 Queen Street, London, EC4N 1TX.

View the 2010 AGM notice, 2010 AGM notice Explanatory notes

Continuing migration of several large US content providers to the Bango system during the year, including Fox Mobile and Turner Broadcasting has contributed to the profitability and increase in revenues.

Ray Anderson, Chief Executive Officer of Bango, commented:

”Following a year which saw continued growth and our first profitable year, we have built a strong sales pipeline and an impressive portfolio of customers. Mobile web usage is accelerating and mobile payments are becoming increasingly important to providers of content and services. As a provider of a mobile payments platform and associated analytics tools, Bango is a major beneficiary of this trend. Working with mobile operators, content providers, brands, as well as other commercial partners and investors, we look forward to delivering continued growth and significant shareholder value.”

As previously indicated, the cash will strengthen the company’s balance sheet and gives Bango flexibility to accelerate mobile operator payments to key customers, thereby improving margin and growth opportunities.

Commenting on this successful placement, Ray Anderson, Bango CEO said:
“We are delighted with the high level of support shown for Bango from investors, illustrating their long term confidence in our business and our ability to create value for our shareholders. With our ability to facilitate commerce on the mobile internet, we believe we are well positioned to benefit from the expected growth in this market in the year ahead and look to the future with confidence.”

The placing raised £3.2 million gross (approximately £3 million net of expenses) through a placing of 7,488,372 new Ordinary Bango shares at 43 pence per share to existing and new shareholders.

Both the CEO and the Chairman of Bango purchased additional shares in the placing.

Bango has recently launched mobile web billing services for T-Mobile USA, Turner Broadcasting and Fox Mobile.

 “This current half is likely to represent a major turning point for Bango,” said Philip Carse, an analyst at Telecom Equity.

You can read the full article here

Bango continues to make excellent progress towards profitability, with revenues for the first half up 83% to £12.32m, and losses after tax reduced to £0.13m. Costs are stable and end user spend gross margin stabilised at 5.3%. We are seeing a continued migration of large U.S. content providers to the Bango system, with new customers won such as Fox Mobile and Turner Broadcasting and several of the world’s largest content providers moving their mobile business onto the Bango platform. This has contributed to the significant increase in transaction volumes over the past year.

The deployment of Bango’s unique technology to enable customer to benefit from Wi-Fi on mobiles is generating additional revenue streams from a new range of customers.

For copies of our Interims Announcement and a slide presentation summarising the results, visit our Key Financial Documents page.