Freelancer delivers record cash receipts and positive cash flow

(MENAFN- ProactiveInvestors)

Freelancer (ASX:FLN) has moved to a positive operating cash flow of $1 million on record cash receipts of $8 million in the first quarter of 2015.

The world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace in terms of users and projects posted a cash balance of $22.1 million as of 31st March 2015 up from $20.2 million at the end of December 2014.

This compares to cash receipts of $7.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2014.

“Freelancer again achieved exceptional results in Q1 with record receipts from customers and projects and contests posted” chief executive officer Matt Barrie said.

“We also moved from negative cash flow in Q4 2014 to positive cash flow in Q1 2015. In addition at the end of the quarter we surpassed 15 million registered users which is a tremendous milestone for the company.”


User Milestone

Freelancer has also surpassed its 15 million user milestone up from 14.3 million registered users as at the end of 2015.

The strong growth in this key operating metric cements the company’s reputation as the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace in terms of users and projects.


Freelancer.com update

During Q1 2015 the company released over 230 incremental improvements to the desktop and mobile sites for Freelancer.com.

It redesigned profile pages to create a better interface for freelancers to showcase their work.

With Freelancer’s crowdsourced contest offering the company upgraded the user interface and enabled a new “urgent” upgrade for people wanting to get work done more quickly.

In order to improve the discoverability of high quality freelancers the company also launched "Skills Lab" an overhaul of its online exam and qualification process.

Freelancer improved the user interface and user experience for online chat on its website and integrated chat support into the desktop application.

The company also improved our algorithms for intelligent matching of demand & supply in the marketplace.

Payments milestones and post project functionality were also implemented in the Android App along with the ability the ability to view currently active jobs in the ‘My Projects’ section and browse proposals from the project page in its iOS App.

Freelancer also launched a new HireMe widget allowing freelancers to be hired directly from third party websites.

It has redesigned and relaunched a new affiliate program structure for third parties to drive traffic to our websites.


Analysis

Freelancer has further demonstrated the strength of its operating model with cash receipts in the first quarter of 2015 up 8.2% from the previous quarter and positive cash flow of $1 million.

The company has also achieved a milestone of 15 million registered users and strong cash balance of $22.1 million.

Freelancer continued to build its global freelancing and crowdsourcing market place platform with the recent acquisition of DoNanza an Israeli marketplace which aggregated and consolidated freelance jobs published across the web and matched them with a network of over 360000 users.

As the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace in terms of users and projects Freelancer is starting to reap the benefits of scale as a relatively fixed cost base once a user base is established enables more of revenues to drop to positive cash flow rather than eaten up in expenses.

We expect the shares in the tightly held company to rise further.

Highlighting the significant upside and potential scale for Freelancer McKinsey Global Institute noted that 160 million jobs or about 11% of the projected 1.46 billion services jobs worldwide could in theory be carried out remotely barring any constraints in supply.

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