BIW TECHNOLOGIES GROWS 24 PER CENT IN 2007

Seventh straight year of growth yields £550,000 profit for UK market leader

04 August 2008

The UK’s leading provider of online construction project control software, BIW Technologies Ltd, grew its turnover by 24 per cent in the year to 30 September 2007, achieving over £0.5m in profits in the process.

According to its latest audited accounts just filed at Companies House, BIW turnover in 2007 grew to £5.76m, up from £4.66m the previous year. A modest 2006 loss of £171,000 was turned around in 2007: BIW generated a profit of £550,000 during the year.

At 30 September 2006, the BIW order book stood at £8.4m - the sum of agreed future Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription fees (not yet recognised as revenue) that will arise from client projects that are being managed using BIW’s system. Since then, a successful 18 months has seen this figure increase to over £12m, as at 31 March 2008.

BIW chief executive Colin Smith says the business has begun to capitalise on its development of applications to manage key business processes within the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) and property sectors:

“Our investments in tools to manage contract processes and project finances are now clearly differentiating BIW from its competitors who remain focused on document collaboration. Sophisticated clients are increasingly looking to BIW to help them manage growing ‘back office’ information processing requirements, where data from BIW’s platform can be selectively interrogated to give managers and directors visibility of key performance indicators – at a project level, across a region or across an entire project portfolio.”

Economic outlook

Smith is also confident that the business will not suffer in any industry downturn:

“Earlier this year we commissioned research which showed many IT decision-makers thought that the current economic difficulties would help accelerate the pace of adoption of SaaS, identifying that it is quicker to implement, more flexible, less costly overall and requires less up-front investment.

“Also, when companies need to manage their project costs even more stringently, online project control systems help improve individual and team productivity, reduce rework and speed up inter-company processes.”

International growth

International expansion has also played a part in BIW’s success. Smith continues:

“BIW has opened a Middle East operations office and established a hosting facility in Dubai, recently winning a major client, property developer Nakheel. We have also established a new development and support centre at Vadodara in Gujarat, India, to help manage the strong client relationships we have established in the Middle East region.”

User base grows

High rates of growth were also observed within the BIW user base. BIW recorded some 3.5 million user sessions for its on-demand solutions (up 38% on 2006) – averaging over 295,000 sessions per month. Some 1.4 million original documents and drawings were published to the system (up 32%).

The user base grew by 22,820 new users from 2,181 companies registered during the year (up 32% and 27% respectively on 2006). In total, at 30 September 2007, BIW had 88,924 registered users from 9,010 companies, working on around 7,000 projects, a rapidly-growing number of which are located outside the UK. It has since taken the total number of users over the 110,000 mark; on 29 July, the BIW user base stood at 110,399, working in 11,174 organisations on 10,324 projects.

More information from:

• Paul Wilkinson, BIW head of corporate communications – 01483 712620 or mobile 07788 445920

Notes to editors:

• Collaboration services delivered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis by BIW Technologies (www.biwtech.com) were first employed in 1999 on UK construction projects for Sainsbury’s. BIW believes it is the European leader in SaaS collaboration systems for the construction and property industry, measured by numbers of users, usage and volume of data.
• The BIW supply chain integration technology has been designed specifically for construction projects or programmes. Each client is provided with a unique, project or programme-specific browser-based toolset created around a knowledge database. With this, data can be made available securely to every team member – from the earliest concepts, through detailed design, buildability studies, pre-fabrication, construction, maintenance, operation and improvement to the eventual demolition or dismantling of the facility.
• BIW customers include United Utilities, Sainsbury’s, BAA, housebuilders Crest Nicholson and the Peabody Trust, Marks & Spencer, the Ministry of Defence, the Wellcome Trust, O2, Mace, Bovis Lend Lease, Kajima, Gleeds and developers Land Securities, Ballymore and Garbe.
• BIW’s usage figures are based purely on drawings and other items published once to its system, not on the number of people on a distribution list. Once a drawing, for example, is published it is counted once only. BIW also separates out process-generated items (eg: comments, requests for information, instructions, transmittals, etc).
• BIW is a registered trademark of BIW Technologies Ltd.