AhnLab Faces Uphill Battle in US – An Addendum

  

This is an addendum the February blog - “AhnLab Faces Uphill Battle in US against FireEye with AhnLab Malware Defense System (MDS)” http://kensek.blogspot.com/2014/02/ahnlab-faces-uphill-battle-in-us.html

If AhnLab is going to make a go of it with their Advanced Persistent Threat product, Malware Defense System (MDS), they must be doing it in incredible stealth mode.  And they must be trying to do it from Korea, where AhnLab is headquartered. 

• Their top US technology person left for a start-up early this year
• There have been no press releases added to the US web site since November 2013
• The company did appear at the Gartner Risk Security & Management Summit in June following up their appearance at RSA SF.  At RSA, they re_announced AhnLab MDS
• AhnLab had posted that they were going to appear at Black Hat Las Vegasin August.  This was removed from their web site.
• Both AhnLab and FireEye complained about an update NSS Labs issued to their 2013 Breach Detection study.  In the original, AhnLab and FireEye finished second and third respectively.  http://kensek.blogspot.com/2014/04/ahnlab-raises-issues-with-recent-nss.html   In the original update, they finished fifth and sixth respectively.  In the post complaints update, AhnLab MDS ranked sixth and FireEye fifth.  Both were far below the other four companies, SourceFire, Trend Micro, Fortinet, and Fidelis.  The updated value map is available at http://www.fortinet.com/sites/default/files/whitepapers/NSS-Labs-2014-BDS-SVM_0.pdf
• If you try to reach AhnLab at their 800 number, 800.511.Ahnlab (2465), you will receive a “you’ve reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service” message.

Perhaps AhnLab is still trying to break into the US licensing Malware Defense System.  If so, they are being incredibly quiet   about it.

An Alternative Look at AVG Technologies’ Q2 Earnings Report

AVG Technologies accounted their Q2 earnings report on July 30.  The stock fell about 13% as the company missed the Q2 revenue consensus of $91 M with revenues of $88 million.  The stock proceeded to drop from $19.65 to $17.10 and they closed the week at $17.05.  To put a long-term perspective on this, AVG went public at around $16 in February 2002, and had a pop.  A negative pop.  Closing the day at just over $13.

Nonetheless, CEO Gary Kovacs stated,  "I am pleased with our continued execution against our long term strategy toward becoming the online security company.”

One problem with the press is that   they will often only look at the company’s most recent earnings report and compare revenue figures to target and nothing else.  Some will do a comparison to the most current quarter versus the same quarter last quarter.  What they should do is a deeper dive into income, cash flow, margins, etc.  The table below compares the first six-month’s figures for AVG, versus the same time frame last year. They should also look at test results from firm's like AV-Comparatives.org av-test.org and Virus Bulletin.  But that's potential material for another blog.

Subscription revenue and SMB revenue for AVG Technologies is up over that period.  Everything else is down.  Even though SMB revenue increased, income decreased.  Revenue decreased across all regions of the world.  Revenue from Google dropped precipitously.  That may be why on August 1, AVG announced that they were extending their partnership with Yahoo.

For those who want to look at cash flow to do their analysis - net cash provided by operations dropped by 37%. 

There is a lot of red in financial trends for AVG year over year.  Pdf’s of AVG Technologies financial results are available at www.investors.avg.com