Icecat annual report 2020: solid growth, improved profitability, and exploding use

Persbericht Icecat (NL)

During 2020, the annual revenues of Icecat increased by 8% to €9.8 million (2019: €9.1 million) according to Icecat’s annual report, which will be presented today in an investor meeting. “The organic growth was somewhat hampered because of the COVID-19 crisis. But, our acquisition strategy paid off as the acquisition of Cedemo contributed to growth from Q2-2020 onward”, according to CEO Martijn Hoogeveen. “During 2020, the order intake developed from a complete standstill in Q1 2020 because of the COVID-19 crisis, to a healthy 20% annual growth in Q4.”

Further, the net profit increased strongly to €1.8 million (2019: €1.4 million euro), mainly caused by the EBITDA increasing considerably by 40% to €1.8 million (2019: €1.3 million), and cost optimizations in other group activities as well. Consequently, cash reserves have increased healthily to €6.2 million (2019: €5.1 million), despite acquisition costs of which an estimated €0.8 million was postponed to 2021.

The general financial strategy of Icecat is further focused on expanding its global footprint, continued fast growth, and operational excellence to optimize but not yet maximize profitability. Free cash flow is used to finance further acquisitions in the consolidating Product Information Management & Syndication (PIMS) market. We’re continuously looking into further options for acquiring competing and highly synergistic businesses, but notice that at the moment the M&A market is overheated.

During 2020, Icecat was once again nominated as an FD Gazelle. Further, Icecat was included as a Dutch top data science provider, and recently included in the Emerce100.

Exploding use

During the COVID-19 year, Icecat’s footprint was growing very fast. We saw the use of Icecat data grow by no less than 75% over the whole of 2020, compared to 2019. As a result, the number of downloads of product data-sheets expanded to about 10 billion.

The annual production was, during 2020, stable at 1.7 million new product data-sheets, whereby the number of brands that manually list products in Icecat has grown by a factor of 10.

Further, the number of supported manufacturer brands increased by 43% to 43.5K, and the number of supported product categories grew by 27% to 7K. Additionally, the number of unique monthly API connects expanded by 22% to 2K. And, also the annual number of new user registrations jumped by 54% to 8.6K. To stress the global, multilingual nature of Icecat, the support of global languages increased by 15% to 69, among others because of the demand for regional Indian languages.

	2020	Y-o-Y
Product Data-Sheet Downloads	9.8 Bio	+75%
Product Data-Sheet Production	1.7 million	stable
Brands supported	43,464	+43%
Categories supported	7,143	+27%
New user registrations	8,565	+54%
Unique monthly API connects (average)	2,008	+22%
Supported languages (or locales)	69	+15%

Sustainable buying decisions

Icecat updated its core mission to explicitly include sustainability: providing data to help consumers and professionals making sustainable buying decisions. During 2020, we expanded the support of GEN (global ecolabelling network) labels, when relevant for the product category. Further, we prepared the switch in 2021 to the updated, mandatory EU Energy Labels for home appliances and cars.

The further opening up of major ecommerce marketplaces, such as the ones of Amazon, Alibaba, Google Shopping, and Facebook, for vendors to easily upload their product data through content partners, has moved Icecat’s competitive edge to being a certified content partner of such marketplaces and building the most efficient rich media integrations.

Sources

• Icecat annual report 2020, audited version (pdf). Because of a change of auditor, the new auditor expects to have the audited version of the annual report available ultimately by June 2021.
  
• NL persbericht