21 December 2021

i-nexus Global plc

("i-nexus", the "Company" or the "Group")

Final Results

i-nexus Global plc (AIM: INX), a leading provider of cloud-based Strategy Execution software solutions designed for the Global 5000, today provides its audited results for the year ended 30 September 2021 ("FY21").

Financial Highlights

·    Group revenue £3.6m (FY20: £4.1m)

o  Recurring revenue £3.3m (FY20: £3.7m)

o  Services revenue £0.3m (FY20: £0.4m)

·    Administrative expenses reduced by 27% to £4.1m (FY20: £5.6m)

·    Group loss before taxation reduced to £1.1m (FY20: £2.4m)

·    Cash & cash equivalents at the period end of £0.6m (FY20: £0.1m)

·    Exit Monthly Recurring Revenue ("MRR") £235k (FY20: £305k)

·    Financial position of the Company secured for the near term by the Convertible Loan notes subscribed for during the year by shareholders

·    Currently trading on an EBITDA positive basis

Operational Highlights

·    Despite the ongoing impact on enterprise software Budgets, successful in closing four new deals across the year with three being in the last quarter

·    Higher level of non-renewing customers than anticipated, but levels of non-renewing customers reduced in the last three months of the year

·    Marketing initiatives started to bear fruit as our investments saw the highest historical results in terms of engagement, reach and therefore leads; confirming our ability to rebuild our prospect pipeline

Post Period End Highlights & Outlook

·    Sales momentum emerged in Q4 and is continuing in FY22

·    At the time of writing this report we have closed six deals in six months; validating our ability to win new business, the longest period on record of regular deal delivery

·    Our average deal size is increasing and we now have clear predictable conversion rates of leads into deals

·    After another tough year we have emerged in a strong position and primed to deliver double digit net Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) growth in FY22

Simon Crowther, Chief Executive, of i-nexus Global plc, commented: "The substantial challenges posed by the pandemic continued in the year, but the ongoing investments made in our products and the changes to our Go To Market strategy started to deliver an increase in new customer win rate in Q4, increased industry recognition and a growing confidence across the business as we head into FY22. The efforts we have made in cash conservation and the uplift in revenues meant we traded on an EBITDA positive footing (adjusted for non-underlying items) for the last three months of the year, with a visible cash runway.

"Our sales pipeline continues to develop with solid new opportunities being created monthly and we have seen a general shortening of sales cycles, reflecting in our improved conversion metrics. We therefore enter the new financial year with a greater level of optimism.

"The changes brought by the pandemic have highlighted the need for scalable, robust, digital strategy execution tools and the market for our software is growing. We are confident we are well positioned, with a differentiated offering, to play a leadership role in this maturing market and are focused on delivering a year of growth."

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About i-nexus Global plc

i-nexus Global plc ("i-nexus") helps organisations achieve their goals. Whether executing a strategy, driving operational excellence and continuous performance improvement, or coordinating portfolios and programs to transform results, i-nexus strategy execution software underpins success.

Today, we support organisations in managing over 200,000 strategic programmes around the world.

i-nexus transforms how organisations plan, execute, and track goals. We inspire the confidence to leave behind the spreadsheets, presentations and reports those organisations rely on, replacing it with a cloud-based, collaborative solution.

Chairman's Statement

For many businesses 2020/21 remained challenging due to economic and commercial uncertainty coupled with all the ongoing disruption caused by the global pandemic. Of course, certain businesses were in the right markets to benefit from the unprecedented demands created by this environment, whilst others were on the wrong side of the "must have / like to have" decision process. However, while in FY20 we saw many large businesses retract from longer term decision making on procuring discretionary enterprise software purchases, during FY21 we saw a distinct change in behaviour from our existing and potential customers as they returned to addressing the fundamental challenge of increasing longer term productivity.

Critical to addressing this challenge is how enterprises deploy their strategy. Having agreed strategic goals, how they set the goals across large and complex businesses, how they measure whether or not they are on track to achieve those goals and finally what to do to course correct if they are not on target. As a Board we are confident that the challenge which i-nexus addresses, the automation of Business Improvement and Strategy Deployment, is one which all businesses face and more and more will seek to address over the coming years. We remain confident that we have an extremely capable solution as demonstrated by the quality of the customers which we currently serve and those with which we are currently negotiating.

i-nexus Global plc went into the FY20 downturn in a particularly weak position, both from a cash and from a sales perspective, but crucially we were supported at this critical time by our major shareholders. We demonstrated to those shareholders the inherent value in this business in terms of the technology we have developed, the customers who have deployed it and the new customers who have signed contracts or are currently in our pipeline. We all acknowledge that there was and continues to be considerable uncertainty about the speed at which the market for strategy deployment software develops but are confident that there is a significant market to address and that such deployments go the heart of how businesses operate. We remained 'hunkered down' during FY21, keeping costs to a minimum, successfully rebuilding our sales pipeline, continuing to service our existing customers, signing new ones and continuing on a more limited basis to develop our technology. Preservation of cash until such time as we can see a clear, sustainable improvement in sales and revenues, was our number one priority and remains so.

Although we successfully signed a number of new customers during FY21 we were hit by higher levels of churn amongst some of our existing customers than we were anticipating. The principal drivers for this churn were M&A activity and customers who found themselves in particularly hard-hit industries. In retrospect, given the considerable M&A activity amongst our customers, such events are not entirely unexpected. We have continued to support such customers in a totally professional manner and one in particular, having been acquired, has already started a new pilot to deploy i-nexus across the new merged entity. The result of this higher than anticipated churn was a tighter than anticipated cash position which was once again supported by our shareholders.

We remain confident that the market we address is emerging and that i-nexus is a leading automation product enabling businesses to deploy strategy more efficiently. We are also confident that we are running as lean a cost base as manageable in challenging times, that we have the appropriate and committed management team and that our core market is undoubtedly growing.

Although we believe that the stock market currently undervalues the business on any comparable metric, we recognise that the management of the business must demonstrate to investors that i-nexus has the exciting potential we can see and that we as a team can realise the results we envisage. Whilst we do so, we will manage our cash resources as effectively as possible, continue to develop one of the best platforms available to enable the automation of business improvement and strategy deployment and continue to drive our exciting sales pipeline as hard as our resources permit.

Finally, I would like once again to thank our management team and employees for their dedication and commitment during these challenging times. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all shareholders who have continued to support the business and in particular those who subscribed for additional Loan Notes during the most challenging of times. They have given the business the opportunity to continue to pursue the growth in new and existing customers and ultimately the financial results the management team work unstintingly to achieve.

Richard Cunningham

Chairman

CEO's Statement

Overview

We have emerged as a stronger business as a result of the commercial and operational challenges of FY21. After the major milestone in FY20 of deploying an upgraded version of i-nexus with a new modern interface across all our customers, which has deepened our understanding of our customers' needs, we are generating the highest number of new sales leads per month, on average one new demo request is arriving per working day and the start of a stable cadence of new contract wins is now visible. We are now moving into what I expect to be an exciting phase in i-nexus' history.

Our shareholders were an invaluable support during the challenges of FY21 and have provided the means for us to get back on a growth trajectory. I would like to add my thanks for that to those expressed by our Chairman.

Trading

The substantial challenges posed by the pandemic continued in the year, but the ongoing investments made in our products and the changes to our Go To Market ("GTM") strategy started to deliver an increase in new customer win rate in Q4, increased industry recognition and a growing confidence across the business as we head into FY22. The efforts we have made in cash conservation and the uplift in revenues meant we traded on an EBITDA positive footing (adjusted for non-underlying items) for the last three months of the year, with a visible cash runway.

The fundraising gave us much needed working capital. We remain conscious of the challenges that still lie ahead, but we are passionate about continuing to deliver on our growth strategy in the coming year while carefully managing our cash resources to ensure the long-term future of the business.

Market opportunity

All businesses set goals, plan how to deliver them and track performance. The challenge is if they can do this at pace, with insight and high levels of visibility across their complex operating environment. In most cases the answer to this is no and this is where i-nexus' software delivers considerable value. While the last 18 months has been painful for many, it brought into focus the importance of strategy being up to date, all in one place and at the fingertips of those driving a business forward and most importantly, remotely and digitally accessible. This, we believe, will see the momentum we have seen in recent months continue and grow in the coming year.

Sales & Marketing activity

Since the launch of our next generation platform, i-nexus Workbench, last year we are encouraged by the exceptionally positive response from existing customers and the high level of interest from new prospects. The flexibility and usability of the platform has enabled us to implement live trials and "test drives" for prospects for the first time, enabling high levels of engagement where prospects can see their own data in the system, providing a powerful proof of the ROI which can be delivered.

The success of these trials and test drives can be seen in the uplift in customer win rate in Q4 and into the new financial year, with five trials converted into annual contracts since July 2021 - an encouraging run rate of new business not experienced for some time.

The four new customers signed in the year were a major domestic appliance manufacturer, the first of six portfolio companies of a US-based Private Equity business, with further companies in their portfolio now evaluating the platform, a European pharmaceutical organisation and a European automotive technology company. Subsequent to the year end, we have signed one further contract with the second of the portfolio companies mentioned above with further deals progressing through contracting.

We currently have several further live trial implementations at multiple enterprises across the US, UK and Europe and a paid Pilot with a major technology company. We continue to see an uplift in new business enquiries as a result of our targeted marketing activities but are mindful that the economic backdrop remains uncertain.

Existing account activity

Typically, our software is initially utilised within one division of our customers, or one geography, with considerable scope for further expansion. However, within the year, we saw lower levels of customer expansion deals than previously with only two notable additions, a cross sell at an existing account to a new geography, Singapore and the conclusion of an enterprise deal with a major technology company whereby their MRR will ramp across the next 3-5 years. Despite these two increases success elsewhere was limited with COVID-19 continuing to impact enterprise software budgets. We have seen some improvement post year end and anticipate a higher level of customer expansion deals in FY22.

Marketing

We have seen a considerably higher level of new business enquiries as we progressed through the year, reflecting both the improving business landscape and our inclusion on G2, the world's largest online technology marketplace within the 'best strategic planning' software category. Having not appeared in this list previously, we now consistently rank highly, having received forty two reviews and three awards. Year on year the result is encouraging with new contacts nearly twice last year's average, content download 1.5 times those on average a year ago and both returning contacts and returning web visits at least five times those a year ago. All of this activity has seen our rate of leads and, importantly, demo requests increase.

Our focus for the year ahead will be to convert this increase in marketing reach, maintain this consistency in the rate of new customer acquisition, expanding with our existing customers and delivering net customer growth.

Business structure

The business comprises four core teams: GTM (Sales & Marketing), Product (Development, Product & Cloud Ops), Success, (all the customer facing & delivery teams) and Business Support (Finance, HR & Admin). Each team has clearly laid out performance metrics and KPIs, to be delivered against quarterly. A key feature of the change in the GTM approach has been to utilise domain experts, with an in depth knowledge of i-nexus, throughout the sales cycle. This has enabled a far greater level of interaction with the prospect's team on a peer-to-peer basis. In addition, we have also adopted a similar approach in customer success, whereby our Solution Consultants are acting as success managers for our accounts. Both these changes are delivering positive results.

As with many software companies, we are an agile business and well-equipped to facilitate remote working. Our staff continue to work successfully from home, with no disruption to the Group's continuity of service and indeed some benefits of the greater ease of collaboration. We took the decision in the year not to renew the lease on our Coventry HQ. We require a more flexible workspace for the future as lockdown restrictions lift and resource planning can become more definitive.

Innovation

Evolving market

Our software category - Strategy Execution Management (SEM) - continues to evolve and gain momentum as companies accelerate digitising mission-critical processes in this post pandemic world. Faced with market uncertainty, this "new normal" future requires companies to increase responsiveness by dynamically managing their strategic plan; something that we believe simply cannot be achieved in spreadsheets and other conventional productivity tools.

The growing importance of the SEM market has been acknowledged by leading analysts including Gartner Research, with SEM now considered an integral part of the new Strategy Portfolio Management (SPM) software category.

Competition

Our competitive landscape has shifted accordingly. Falling under Strategic Portfolio Management from an analyst perspective, has had two effects. It has both distanced us from many previous SEM competitors but also introduced new SPM competitors.

Against remaining SEM vendors, i-nexus is differentiated in both its depth of capabilities and its ability to support larger deployments where stringent IT requirements - including data security - must be met and flexibility in configuration is needed. Those capabilities include the X-Matrix interactive planning used by multiple strategy execution methodologies including Hoshin Kanri.

i-nexus has two clear advantages in strategy execution against SPM vendors: powerful strategic planning and performance management capabilities that complement portfolio management features. Plus, i-nexus' customers benefit from experience gained from over fifteen years of market experience in strategy execution.

Customer priorities

The past twelve months have seen the emergence of two clear trends in customer priorities. The first is around the governance of strategic data. Responding to changing market conditions requires real-time strategic insight that depends ultimately on quality data. Customers increasingly rely on i-nexus to centralise and manage this data, and furthermore present executives with visualisation and reporting on strategic health

The second noticeable trend is growing interest in rethinking the traditional annual strategic planning process, applying agile principles to strategic planning and delivery. Approaching strategic execution in a more incremental way enables customers to regularly assess not just progress toward the strategic plan but also any internal and external factors that might warrant strategic course correction.

In the year ahead we will continue to evaluate our product market fit and deliver those enhancements that respond to the market needs, especially those resulting from a greater extent of virtual operations.

Partners

While we secured one new customer at the start of the year via a partner, our consulting partners largely continued to be impacted by COVID-19, seeing their own pipelines slow down and facing substantial uncertainty, we therefore have reduced our focus on this area for the time-being.

People

Once again, I would like to thank our amazing team personally and on behalf of the Board. We are incredibly lucky with the talent and commitment of the team that we have at i-nexus. This has not been an easy year, but everyone has worked incredibly hard to make it a success and I am delighted for all of us that we are now starting to see the fruits of those labours.

Current Trading and Outlook

We exited the year with a Monthly Recurring Revenue rate of £235k and we continue to trade on a monthly EBITDA positive basis. Importantly, we have seen levels of non-renewing customers reduce considerably over the last five months and we do not expect to see a repeat of the rates seen last year.

Our sales pipeline continues to develop with solid new opportunities being created monthly and we have seen a general shortening of sales cycles, reflecting in our improved conversion metrics. We therefore enter the new financial year with a greater level of optimism.

The changes brought by the pandemic have highlighted the need for scalable, robust, digital strategy execution tools and the market for our software is growing. We are confident we are well positioned, with a differentiated offering, to play a leadership role in this maturing market and are focused on delivering a year of growth.

Simon Crowther

Chief Executive Officer