RNS Number : 6083O
Keywords Studios PLC
31 January 201931 January 2019
Keywords Studios plc("Keywords Studios", "the Group")
Full year trading update
Strong financial performance - strengthening our market
leading position
As indicated in the brief trading update of 21 December 2018,
Keywords Studios, the international technical services provider to theglobal video games industry, today provides an unaudited trading
update for the year ended 31 December 2018, following another yearof good organic growth and geographic expansion, complemented bya number of important and successful acquisitions.
The Board expects full year revenues to be at least €250m (FY17:€151.4m) and adjusted proﬁt before tax* of approximately €37.8m(FY17: €23.0m). The Group's eﬀective tax rate, based on Keywords
Studios' measure of proﬁt before tax* has continued to reduce and isexpected to be 19.0% (FY17: 20.5%). As a result, adjusted earnings
per share are expected to be c.47.0c, which would be an increase of
51% compared to the prior year (FY17: 31.18c).
Organic revenue growth continues to be an important feature for theGroup which, on a like for like basis, grew by 10.1%**. When
excluding VMC from this analysis, like for like revenue growth would
have been 14.9%.
During the year, the Group welcomed eight businesses into the groupthrough acquisition, and the Group ﬁnished the year with net debt of€0.4m (2017: net cash of €11.1m), after the €26.2m net cash outlay
on acquisitions and deferred consideration during the year,
demonstrating the Group's strong underlying cash generation.
Almost all of the seven service lines ha ve delivered a strong
performance, with particularly strong growth in our Player Supportand Engineering businesses, partially oﬀset by a weaker than
expected performance from Localisation Testing which saw a numberof titles move from the last quarter of the year into the current year.
Andrew Day, Chief Executive of Keywords, commented:"We are pleased with the Group's continued organic growth, in a year
in which our markets were impacted by the Fortnite phenomenon.
This together with the Group's successful acquisitive growth has seen
us increase revenues and proﬁt before tax by approximately 65% in
the year.

"Particularly exciting for us during the year has been our expansion
into new areas including predictive analytics, music services,marketing services, sound design, and Hollywood-based voice
production and writing services. Our eight acquisitions in the year are
bedding down and performing well.
We completed our ﬁrst
acquisition of 2019 on the 3 January, of Sunny Side Up, which is ourthird acquisition in marketing services. We see good potential in 2019
for this area which includes the creation of game trailers and othermarketing assets for leading game companies.
"As we look forward to another year of extending the ways in whichwe work with our video game developer and publisher clients, we arepleased to report that we are engaged on a number of projects withclients who are investing in the ﬁeld of cloud-based gaming. This isan exciting development in the games market as a whole, as 5G
mobile networks and expanded internet bandwidths allow for theemergence of platforms aiming to become the "Netﬂix of gaming".
We expect this to create enhanced demand for both content, which
would beneﬁt most of our service lines, and for making games moreaccessible to more people in more territories, which would fueldemand for localisation in particular."*before acquisition and integration expenses, share option charges,
amortisation of intangibles and foreign currency gains**calculated on the basis that the FY 2017 comparative includes all of
the 2017 and 2018 acquisitions as if they had been owned for thesame period in 2017 as they have been in 2018 and on a constantcurrency basis
The Group expects to announce its full year results for the year
ended 31 December 2019 on 8 April 2019.
For further information, please contact:
Keywords
Studios (www.keywordsstudios.com)
Andrew Day, Chief Executive Officer
David Broderick, Chief Financial Officer+353 190 22 730

Numis (Financial Adviser)
Stuart Skinner / Kevin Cruickshank (NominatedAdviser)
James Black / Tom Ballard (Corporate Broker)
MHP Communications (Financial PR)
Katie Hunt / Ollie Hoare020 7260 1000

020 3128 8100
keywords@mhpc.com

About Keywords Studios (www.keywordsstudios.com)
Keywords Studios is an international technical services provider to the global video games
industry. Established in 1998, and now with over 50 facilities in 20 countries strategicallylocated in Asia, the Americas and Europe, it provides integrated art creation, software
engineering, testing, localisation, audio and customer care services across more than 50
languages and 16 games platforms to a blue-chip client base of approximately 650 clients
across the globe. It has a strong market position, providing services to 23 of the top 25
most prominent games companies, including Activision Blizzard, Bandai Namco, Bethesda,
Electronic Arts, Konami, Riot Games, Sony, Square Enix, Supercell, TakeTwo, Epic Games

and Ubisoft. Recent titles worked on include Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, Call of Duty: WWII,
Mortal Combat X, Assassin's Creed Origins, Battlefield 1, League of Legends, Fortnite,
Clash Royale and Rainbow Six Siege. Keywords Studios is listed on AIM, the London Stock
Exchange regulated market (KWS.L).

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