Mobile content specialist Crowd Mobile has big hopes for its question and answer apps business, despite a stronger Australian dollar hurting its fourth quarter underlying earnings.
The company's Q&A unit - which has 18 lifestyle and financial services apps that connect paying users to experts for advice - delivered its tenth consecutive quarter of growth in billed messages, Crowd Mobile announced on Tuesday.
Billed messages on the service jumped 12 per cent in the three months to June 30 to 2.6 million messages .
"The Q&A business unit performance continues to exceed our expectations and we are excited to see where we can take things in the 2017 financial year," tech entrepreneur and chief executive Domenic Carosa, said on Tuesday.
Crowd Mobile, which operates in more than 50 countries, said it secured a number of new mobile app deals during the fourth quarter and continued its push into the higher-value professional services sector with financial advice, tax and legal Q&A apps in Australia.
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Mr Carosa, once the head of former ASX-listed media group Destra Corp, is confident that recent changes made to the business, including the stabilisation of its subscription business Track, new executive hires and fine tuning of its marketing strategy, will begin to deliver returns in the year ending June 30, 2017.
"We have invested heavily in recruiting and training our leadership teams, our new product sets, and our debt is under control. We are highly confident on delivering on our growth aspirations," Mr Carosa said in a statement.
One of Crowd Mobile's apps, 'FinanceMe', is Australia's first financial advice app that allows users to ask questions and obtain investment advice from a team of experts at Melbourne-based Peak Asset Management.
Users pay from $3.49 a question with responses being made available within 12 hours across topics such as personal finance and investment, the share market and economy and stocks, he said.
One example of a question, provided by Crowd Mobile, is: I'm going to spend $1800 on a laptop for work - how much of this will I get back in tax? How can I maximise this?
The company said Q&A's billed messages volume jumped 66 per cent to nine million in the year ended June 30 from a year earlier.
Crowd Mobile booked a nine per cent drop in underlying earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation to $2.95 million for the fourth quarter, blaming the strengthening Australian dollar against the euro and pound, particularly following Britain's referendum to leave the European Union in June.
Crowd Mobile reported a slight rise in fourth-quarter revenue to $11.54 million from $11.46 million a year earlier due to "unfavourable exchange rates."
Crowd Mobile's shares were down 0.5 cents to 15 cents in a lower Australian market at 1403 AEST.
