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#ASX Announcements
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Last edited 3 years ago

24 February 2021

Appen Maintains Solid Growth

Appen Limited (Appen) (ASX:APX) a global leader in the development of high-quality, human annotated datasets for machine learning and artificial intelligence(AI), has today announced its results for the full year ended 31 December 2020

  • Revenue up 12% to $599.9M
  • Underlying EBITDA of $108.6M up 8%, statutory EBITDA up 23%
  • Growing customer base including 136 new customer wins in 2020
  • 34% increase in the number of projects with top five customers
  • Committed revenue increased to 31% of 2H20 total revenue, up from 12% in 1H20
  • China revenue growing at 60% quarter on quarter
  • $78M in cash at 31 December 2020
  • Final dividend of 5.5 cps, 50% franked, up 10% on 2019 final dividend
  • Full year underlying EBITDA for the year ending 31 December 2021 is expected to be in the range of A$120M - A$130M, representing growth of 18% - 28% on FY20 underlying EBITDA (ex. FX gain) of $101.8M
#AI and Data Collection
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Added 3 years ago

Jan 15 By Tyler Galagher

Wisdom From The Women Leading The AI Industry, With Dr. Judith Bishop of Appen

...

Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?

There are no uninteresting projects in AI, and while I can’t give specifics, we’ve started to move into multimodal data creation and product evaluation projects that require a new focus on time and timing — for example, how the visual output of the AI engine, such as an avatar face or face and body, aligns in time with the synthesized speech. Human beings are super keyed into timing. It’s usually at a subliminal level, but as you know from watching poorly dubbed movies, any slight misalignment between channels can really make the experience challenging.

What are the 5 things that most excite you about the AI industry? Why?

What excites me most about AI is that it’s aimed both at mimicking and exceeding human capabilities of reasoning, perception and communication. The knowledge we’ll gain about ourselves through developing AI — how we interact with each other and with the world — will be so deep. Linguists will be critical to this process because we’ll have to unpack how we communicate in order to help machines learn what we do and how we understand the world.

Another exciting area of development is that, with COVID-19, contactless services will continue to be important to all types of service providers. As we look to convert any situation where you currently have to walk into a room and talk with someone into a contactless service, we’ll continue to look at ways that AI can power chatbots, virtual assistants and the like. In healthcare, for example, there’s tremendous interest in developing AI-powered healthcare assistants that can perform triage to provide more options that eliminate the need for patients who are feeling ill to travel to see a doctor. This type of benefit will be replicated across many industries.

What are the 5 things that concern you about the AI industry? Why?

I would bucket my concerns into two main categories. First is the fact that policy and regulation are lagging far behind AI development. There’s a very real possibility that AI will leave people vulnerable in ways they’ve never been before. AI-powered insights into how we communicate and what we’re expressing and the emotions we’re expressing it with — things most people will want to keep hidden — will be stored in systems and devices. This can create opportunities for abuse.

It’s also a possibility that we could fail to ensure that AI technology is fair in terms of diversity and inclusivity. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, if we use biased training data for AI systems, we could end up replicating existing human bias in powerful AI projects that treat people unfairly on a huge scale. Systemic bias in automated systems for mortgage and credit applications, insurance rates, and even hiring come immediately to mind.

...

Full text can be found here: https://medium.com/authority-magazine/wisdom-from-the-women-leading-the-ai-industry-with-dr-judith-bishop-of-appen-f285e24cd63a

 

#AI and Data Collection
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Added 3 years ago

Appen worked closely with Microsoft on the recent addition of Inuktitut text transalation to Microsoft Translator.

"Inuktitut, a dialect of the Inuit language Inuktut, is spoken across Inuit Nunangat, the Inuit homeland in Canada, and is the mother tongue of about forty thousand Inuit in Canada ", Microsoft.

#Financials
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Added 4 years ago

25th February 2020

HIGH PERFORMANCE UNDERPINNED BY STRONG ORGANIC GROWTH Figure Eight rebounds

  • Revenue up 47% to $536.0M
  • Underlying EBITDA of $ 101.0M up 42%, statutory EBITDA up 29%
  • Underlying NPAT of $64.7M up 32%, statutory NPAT flat on last year
  • Organic revenue of $498.1M up 37%
  • Organic underlying EBITDA up 51% to $10 7.3M
  • Figure Eight rebounds to high growth with year end ARR of $33.7M
  • Speech and Image delivers an unprecedented revenue result of $67.7M, up 32% on 2018
  • Relevance revenue of $430.0M, up 37% and margins improve to 25.7%
  • The Company’s full year underlying EBITDA for the year ending Dec 31st 2020 is expected to be in the range $125M - $130M (at A$1 = US$0.70, Feb-Dec 2020)
#ASX Announcements
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Added 4 years ago

18th November 2019

APPEN ANNOUNCES FULL YEAR EARNINGS UPGRADE

...

The Company’s full year underlying EBITDA for FY2019, ending December 31st 2019, is estimated to be in the range of $96M to $99M. This forecast translates November and December performance at A$1=US$0. 74, whereas translation at current levels is estimated to add a further $1.0M-$1.5M to underlying EBITDA. Previous guidance was for underlying EBITDA trending to the upper end of $85M-$90M.

Appen’s improved FY2019 earnings forecast is driven by increases in monthly relevance revenues and margins, largely from existing projects with existing customers.

The Company reinforces its high conviction for the acquisition of Figure Eight and confirms previous 2019 ARR guidance of $30M-$35M (at A$1=US$0.74) – set in August 2019.