Appen has been on my watchlist for a while. Unfortunately the fundamentals are rather poor at the moment, so I am not tempted to invest in it, but I am extremely curious why did Appen not do well as a business (at least so far).
I am in the IT for my entire professional career so I understand the value they are offering to businesses. And that is what makes it even weirder for me - at the time of the bubble-like AI&ML hype their services to provide structured processed data to the companies should be in high demand. After all, to train an ML model you need processed and structured data. So I am genuinely wondering what went wrong. Have their customers developed similar capabilities in-house? Was there a technology shift to make their services obsolete? Did they lose to a more successful competitor?
They were quite profitable until 2021, so their business model was viable at some point. I get the inflation and the rate rises, but the magnitude of decline for a service that is supposed to be in demand is quite unusual.
I am sure there are people here with much better knowledge of the company than I, would be great to hear from them.
Good luck to holders, hope it turns around.
APX Price at posting:
60.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Not Held
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