Boku Inc (LON:BOKU) Chief Executive Officer Stuart Neal caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss interim results for the first half of 2025, highlighting strong revenue growth, increased user activity, and strategic expansion into local payment methods.
Q1: Stuart, interim results now published. Could you just walk us through the key financial highlights from the period?
A1: We are super pleased with our numbers for the first half of 2025. We posted revenues of $63.3 million; that’s a 34% increase on the same period last year. We also posted an adjusted EBITDA number of $21.8 million and so that’s up around 53% on the prior year. Now, it’s worth pointing out that we did include and pull out of those numbers around about $3 million of what we’ve called ‘launch phase pricing’ so really some exceptional margin that we benefited from in the first half that we know that will not recur on an ongoing basis. So, we have removed that, and we still posted a very strong 27% increase on the top line and a 29% increase at an EBITDA level.
Beneath that, the drivers of that performance were monthly active users, which is basically the people that have made a transaction on our platform in the month of June, was up at 95.5 million people using the Boku platform to make a purchase, so very, very strong. That in turn drove transaction volume or process volume of $7.4 billion so the drivers, the leading indicators of our performance, again, very strong, TPV up 28%.
Within that, there is a mix of products so our flagship product, Direct Carrier Billing, grew 9%, half on half but really exceptional performance on our bundling product, what we call DCB bundling, which was up 70%. That’s really proving to be an incredibly popular product with our customers, and that’s now around about 10% of our overall revenues.
Within that, the fastest growing part of our book is the extension into wider LPM so digital wallets and account to account, which was up about 89% in the first half year on year. So, that’s really growing really fast.
Our cash numbers continue to grow, and we had $87 million of our own cash at the end of the first half and that’s despite making around $12 billion of share buybacks during the period. So, our cash generation as a business remains incredibly strong.
Q2: Your strategic and operational highlights mention enabling global tech giants to reach new consumers, delivering 60 new connections for your merchants, and onboarding new merchants. Could you elaborate on those initiatives and explain how they support Boku’s overall strategy?
A2: So, a big part of our growth strategy is working with some of the world’s largest tech companies, all of those tech companies have continued ambitions to grow around the world. The way that we help them do that is by connecting them to more paying customers and those paying customers come to them through the local payment methods, which are attached to the Boku network.
Part of our growth story is just by connecting our existing customers to more and more different local payment methods around the world and we have ongoing programmes with all of our existing customers and that’s creating a big part of our current growth.
So, if you see through the back of the Boku platform, we can actually see seven billion individual accounts, not people, of course, but individual accounts that come to us through our connections to the LPMs. That’s what’s so appealing for our merchants.
Q2: You previously had a medium-term guidance. Could you remind us of the targets and if you’re still on track to achieve those targets?
A2: What we said at the time of the full year results was that we were going to achieve a minimum of 20% revenue growth on a compound annual growth basis over the coming few years. So, we know in the world that we operate, growth is never a straight line, but it’s a bit wavy depending on which connections we put live for which customers and the timing of all of those things.
On the average, we would expect revenues to grow north of 20% on a compound basis and that within that, despite the fact that we continue to invest in our business, invest in our platform, invest in our new products and capabilities, we will still deliver an EBITDA number that is north of 30% across that period.
To answer your question more directly, we are very comfortable with that guidance, and we remain on track to achieve that.
Q3: Just looking ahead, what can investors expect from Boku over the next six months in terms of growth and strategic priorities?
A3: Well, I have to be a bit careful here because we have a Capital Markets Day coming up on the 16th October, so just a few weeks away, and at that event, we’ll be outlining just how we plan to deliver the growth, both from our existing merchant programmes, what we’re doing to attract more and more new merchants to the platform to help propel our growth. Underpinning all of that, what are the new products and services and the innovation that we are investing in in order to drive ongoing margins.
So, we will delve into all of those topics at the capital markets day but for the second half of this year, just as a quick sneak peek is more of the same, more connections for our existing merchants and we will start to see very subtly the impact of some of the other investments we’ve been making over the last year or so.
