The business social network Xing must be pleased with its online ticketing operation, Amiando. It looks like the service has managed to double its sales over the last year.
As Amiando’s founders prepare their valedictory speeches (they’re off to formulate a new venture soon), the company has published a number of selected statistics, showing how well they’ve been doing “on the international road”.
The company says it’s been used to organise “over 180,000″ events worldwide now. Overall, year-on-year sales growth for the period of January to May 2012 was “over 100 percent”. Growth in the U.S. (where Amiando doesn’t even have an office) is “about 150 percent”, and in the UK and Asia (where it does) it’s “over 135 percent”.
Presumably this is intended as a way to front up to Eventbrite, the American event service that says it’s targeting Europe as it expands globally.
The frustrating thing, of course, is that percentage increases are very difficult to interpret when you don’t know the base. And unfortunately, as Xing is now the daddy, the Amiando team was unable to help me out there.
I’m willing to accept that the overall sales growth looks good. The company’s been going for six years. It’s not the 200 percent growth Amiando was quoting in 2009, but it’s impressive enough and — presumably — must come from a fairly solid base at this stage in the game.
Beyond that, I don’t know what to make of it. Around two-thirds of Amiando’s business is still in Germany, meaning the rest still forms a relatively low proportion, even with the London office opening this year and Paris and Hong Kong offices opening last year. So the higher growth figures there (except for France it seems, which isn’t mentioned) could be less impressive than they first seem.
The free-floating figures quoted on Thursday certainly don’t tell us much when trying to compare Amiando’s success with Eventbrite’s. The last metrics we got from Eventbrite was the sale of its fifty-millionth ticket in February and the milestone of $ 1 billion of tickets sold last month — sadly, not comparable to any of Amiando’s stats.
But hey, even if the numbers don’t say much, they do look good as an end-of-term report for Amiando’s soon-to-depart founders, and as an early-days reflection on Xing’s stewardship of the business. Onwards and upwards!
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