Falanx Group Ltd (LON:FLX) Chief Executive Officer Stuart Bladen caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their Annual Results for the Year-Ended 31 March 2017
Q1: Stuart, you’ve just announced your annual results today, can you just remind our listeners of the headlines?
A1: Sure. Our revenue is up 50% to £2.7 million, Cyber is up 400% to just under £1 million, Intelligence is up 13% to £1.8 million and we’re better than planned along the bottom line. We’ve paid off all our debts so Falanx is debt-free.
Q2: That sounds like strong progress to me! What’s driven all of this?
A2: Yes, it is strong progress and we’re very very pleased. The first point is Cyber, up 400%, we acquired ASC a year ago, Jay Abbott and the team have done a great job, they’ve integrated the business, they’ve ramped revenue quickly, revenue doubled from the first to the second half and that’s just amazing. So, we now offer a full life cycle of cyber services, that includes security assessment, testing and consulting, we monitor clients, we help them to detect cyber-attack and to respond to it and clients are definitely responding to our broader portfolio.
Secondly, the Intelligence team has been totally solid, it’s been ahead of budget all year, they grew 13%, all organic, there was strong demand for intelligence reports and for embedded analysts, that’s where we plant our analysts deep inside our clients’ own teams.
Thirdly, we tripled capacity, our new cyber centre in Birmingham went live December, we increased capability and reduced cost at the same time, through that relocation and we’ve been working hard with channel partners and new sales and marketing team.
Q3: So, is the market a factor in your growth, how quickly is the cyber security market developing?
A3: Absolutely, yes. Barely a day goes by at the moment without cyber headlines and that drives cyber business and, sadly, the world of politics is in turmoil too and this drives Falanx Group’s intel business. More than ever, companies need to manage both cyber and political risk and the market in cyber services, our bit you asked, that’s growing at around 25% per year.
Q4: What are your plans for monitoring the MidGARD platform over the coming months?
A4: So, MidGARD will shortly emerge from pilot, we should hit scale rollout in H2 and this is important for our second half so as you’d imagine, our tech team is on ??short finals?? right now and our sales and marketing staff are gearing up.
Q5: How do you view the rest of the year for Falanx Group Ltd?
A5: Firstly, we announced the acquisition of Cloudified last week so I’d like to welcome Danny Waite MD to our team so job 1 is integration of Cloudified. Next, our test and consult teams are growing and they’re key contact points for our clients and opportunities. Third, we’ve got to launch MidGARD at scale and we then need to bed down our new sales and marketing team. Our embedded analyst team is also growing too, we have new contracts and embeds about to start.
Overall, we also see two market shifts coming this year, one if GDPR, the General Data Protection Requirement, it comes in next May and it’s going to drive a huge take-up in cyber. The second market shift we see is that cyber and intel are coming together, more and more clients are managing these together with a Chief Risk Officer at board level so our cyber and intel businesses will also get closer together, collaborating in clients and offering more joint solutions.
Altogether, we’ve got a lot to do, as much this year as last, it is hard work but it’s also fun too because we’re a growing business in a really exciting market.
