YOUNiQ Helps Precise Weather Volatile Mobile Market

Precise Biometrics has released an interim financial report for the first quarter of 2021. In that regard, the company’s performance was slightly worse than it was in the first quarter of 2020, coming in at SEK 20.3 million in revenue (approximately $2.4 million USD) instead of the SEK 23.065 million the company brought in the year before.

According to Precise, much of that shortfall can be attributed to COVID-19, which disrupted the mobile market and created a component shortage for equipment manufacturers. That lowered product volume and decreased the amount that Precise expected to collect in royalties for providing technology for those devices.  

However, Precise noted that its efforts to diversify its portfolio have started to pay dividends, and that its move into the access control space has made the company less reliant on the mobile industry alone. The company carried out several YOUNiQ installations during the first three months of the year, deploying face-based access control technology at Science Village in Lund and at the North Country Incubator facility at Clarkson University. The latter represents Precise’s first YOUNiQ project in the United States.

Precise was still active on the mobile front, announcing that Qualcomm has integrated Precise’s biometric matching software into its latest generation of in-display fingerprint sensors. KONA I also received a Mastercard Letter of Approval for a card featuring Precise fingerprint tech, though that letter arrived shortly after the period covered in the report.

Financially speaking, Precise suffered a loss of about SEK 3.8 million (as opposed to a profit of SEK 148,000 in the comparable quarter of last year), but it did enjoy a positive EBITDA of SEK 22,000. Its cash flow from operations came to negative SEK 660,000, down from about SEK 6.9 million in 2020.

Precise believes that its YOUNiQ prospects will continue to improve as companies search for more eco-friendly access solutions that do not rely on plastic cards or tags. The company has launched a pilot project with an existing customer to help minimize energy consumption.

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May 14, 2021 – by Eric Weiss