InMobi, the Softbank-backed mobile advertising company, has announced that it has achieved profitability in the year 2016, and hopes to continues this for the current year also. This will also mark the first such instance of operational profitability among India’s famed, yet money guzzling ‘unicorns’.
The company was able to turn profitable on the back of delivery of video advertisement to smartphone users and by helping clients increase the conversion rate for online shopping.
The Bangalore-based company, which claims to be the third largest digital ad network after Google and Facebook, said it was profitable on Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) in calendar year 2016.
In the last quarter, it said it was net-profitable, and expects the trend to carry over in 2017. InMobi did not provide specific numbers for its EBITDA, or operational, profit or net profit.
Commenting on this, Naveen Tewari, co-founder and chief executive of the company, said,
We took some courageous decisions, to drop non-core areas and focus on existing bets, which have held us in good stead. We stand with the firm belief that mobiles will be the de facto advertising medium in the coming years.
You can take long-term bets only if your primary business model is successful. We got that right in the last 12-18 months and turned profitable for 2016. To us, it was a big milestone. We started focusing on that towards 2015.
Justin Wilson, operating partner for it at SoftBank, said,
We believe inMobi’s global footprint, compelling technology, and world class team, position them well to partner with advertisers to reach an increasingly mobile-centric audience.
A person familiar with the developments at InMobi, said that the company expects to end 2017 with revenue of $425 million to $475 million, and is on course to record an annual profit of $40 million.
For the advertising company, the largest revenue-generating market remains the United States, while China now stands as its second-largest market, representing about 28% of overall revenue.
InMobi, which was previously known as mKhoj, was founded by Naveen Tewari, Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta, and Abhay Singhal in the year 2007. The company has so far raised about $220 million across multiple rounds from firms like SoftBank Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield, and Byers Sherpalo Ventures.
It enables consumers to discover new products and services by providing contextual and personalised ad experiences on mobile devices. InMobi’s offerings include a complete tech-stack and ad formats across both direct and programmatic channels.
The company claims to be the largest mobile-first, independent, full-stack advertising platform, with a global scale of 1.56 billion users and is among the top five players in the US, China, Southeast Asia, and India.
