Innity buoyant on digital advertising

PETALING JAYA: Online media and advertising technology provider Innity Corp Bhd is upbeat on its prospects as digital advertising expenditure (adex) continues to be on the rise compared with overall spending in the advertising industry.
Executive chairman Peter Phang Chee Leong (pix) said digital adex growth averaged 20% to 30% year-on-year across the region, higher than the adex growth of 12% to 15% in Malaysia.
"Compared with TV, radio and newspaper, digital is comparatively smaller so there's a lot of room for growth," he told reporters after its EGM here yesterday.
He added that in Asia, the region is still far from developed countries where the digital media outpaces the traditional media, thus opportunities are aplenty here, given that Innity's presence in Asia are in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China.
"The overall adex and its pace of growing are quite slow and it may even shrink, but digital has the most significant growth," said Phang.
He said Innity's revenue for this year would be driven by mobile advertising, social media advertising and programmatic advertising (real-time bidding ad buying), where it sees high growth due to high consumption.
However, he noted that mobile contribution is still small now, compared with its core revenue from PC and laptop-based digital advertising.
"Currently, mobile consumption is not in proportion to mobile spending yet because mobile spending is still new to advertisers," said Phang.
Established in 1999, ACE-Market listed Innity provides interactive online marketing platforms and data-driven technologies for advertisers and publishers. Its network spans across over 10,000 websites, 350 million unique visitors each month, 3 billion ad impressions monthly and 18 content interest channels such as technology, lifestyle, automotive, business and entertainment.
Malaysia is Innity's major contributor to the group, making up 35% of its revenue, followed by Hong Kong, Indonesia and Philippines.
"Malaysia will experience organic growth. It is our headquarters and we're the market leader. At the moment, it has stabilised and is an established market," said Phang.
Moving forward, the group will focus more on the regional markets as it sees good potential from Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand.
Phang said it continues to look for mobile technology partnerships that can contribute to the core value of the company but is currently not in any discussions now.