Some of my thoughts/opinions There are lots of great contributors here on this board..would love to hear some of their opinions
So acuity said they will have more than the 1 million ebitda they had q1 last year. It will probably be slightly above that. If the circumstances were different without the current epidemic I believe they would probably have almost double with much smaller loss than last year. If they can get away with less than a 2 million loss this quarter and next given the circumstances, they will be on track for a great recovery into q3/q4 imo. Survival of a company through this epidemic is the most important and I firmly believe they can. They will take advantage of the overly generous wage subsidy from the government, plus I'm sure they will get huge grants from other avenues available to Canadian tech companies that they are already channeled into.
The company is working on their new self serve platform to perfect it and it should be on schedule because the employees are still all working from home and collaborating. The idea is that it will be super easy to use and attract more spend from existing and new clients. Margins are great because even if they are at 30% (below 50% managed) they don't have the same expense with payroll to execute. Combined with At's leading ai development, 120million sales (a lot in the coveted us market) I can't see how they aren't an attractive take out target. Roku bought dataxu for 150 million, it was below dataxu expectations of 250million. I thought they were doing well and not sure what the rush was to sell. The interesting thing is all Roku wanted was dataxu programmatic platform..the customers they had really have nothing to do with Roku's line of business of buying ads on their platform. I thought these huge companies could just build their own if they wanted to but I suspect it's not that easy and the years of developing ai and the data from customers has a lot to do with it. It's a drop in the bucket for a big company to buy a great platform they can use for managing their own ads and I guess not worth the time developing. There is no doubt buying ads programmatically is growing. Wouldn't it be a matter of time before the big ad agencies that are worth billions get their own platform for clients..if acuity has one of the easiest to use that will be attractive.
All the smaller ad tech companies that don't have the cash to survive are gonna dissapear, leaving more business out there for the ones that do, should benefit acuity. There are big agencies that are not in programmatic, existing big programmatic platforms from overseas, or a company that wants their own platform for buying their ads that can be potential suitors..just my thoughts..hope everyone is staying safe!