Lateral announces intention to list
Auckland, New Zealand. 30 July, 2014 – Lateral Corporation (Lateral), specialists in user-pays mobile interactive
products and services, mobile payments and mobile marketing, today announced its intention to list on the NZAX.
An initial compliance listing will be followed by a period of capital-raising to raise $1.5 million with qualifying
investors, which will be used to fund growth ambitions across several markets including Australia, the UK and USA.
Lateral is at the forefront of the creation of user-pays mobile digital products and services. Its upcoming listing will
ensure the company capitalises on its early lead in this emerging market, which has strong long-term growth prospects.
In particular, the two converging trends of modern smartphones equipped with HTML5, along with the introduction of new
generation Direct Carrier Billing in several key markets, are significant. These advances allow Lateral to reach and
transact with an increasingly large volume of consumer traffic on mobile devices and to monetise those transactions.
Lateral’s Viaduct platform, designed specifically for the burgeoning smartphone market, creates and hosts cloud based,
digital products, services and applications, manages sales and distribution, and bills customers, in effect providing a
direct supply chain where new products and services can come online down the track.
Says CEO Roger Grice, “rather than building a single app to distribute through the Apple or Google app stores we’re
developing a digital supply chain. In the upcoming world, where apps migrate to the Cloud, we believe this is a powerful
strategy. We have spent the past 5 years developing our Viaduct platform, which not only develops apps, but can host
other apps, enabling us to distribute and bill for third party digital products.”
Growth of consumer transactions on mobile devices is on a steep incline, with Direct Carrier Billing (which allows
seamless billing of products and services directly to customers’ mobile phone accounts), expected to grow to US$12
billion in the next three years.
Board Chairman, Dene Biddlecombe says “We are in a really exciting place right now. With the bulk of development
completed, we are ready to get our next generation of products into the smartphone market and put a meaningful marketing
budget behind them. The timing is right for Lateral to raise additional funds to accelerate these growth plans.”
Lateral is led by an experienced and talented board and senior management team, combining in-market experience with new
thinking. A key attribute of a number of senior team members is experience with extreme revenue growth.
While it has a low profile in New Zealand, Lateral has been very influential in the development of interactive mobile
technology behind the scenes. It has managed the TXT voting for almost every large scale TV interactive programme for
the last 10 years. Lateral’s social interactive products have been substantial contributors to a number of Mobile
carrier portals, such as Telecom Xtra, Vodafone Live!, TMobile (formerly Telstra Big Pond), and Optus Zoo. The majority
of its business comes from Australia, where its mobile interactive services like OZchat are well known.
ENDS