By Daniel Van Boom
After years of struggling to win over investors, CEO Will Lopes is finally earning applause following a strong earnings report for the sports tech company.
Catapult’s stock surged to new peaks on Wednesday,signalling a return to form for the once-hyped sports tech company — and marking a high point for chief executive Will Lopes, nearly six years into his tenure.
The company’s market cap hit $1.3 billion, a dramatic comeback for a business that, just over two years ago, was valued at a sixth of that. It’s a notable win for Lopes, who stepped into the top job in 2019 when Catapult was in the doldrums.
“When I got here, to be honest, the company was in a bit of disarray,”Lopes said to
Capital Brief.
“They had no CEO for almost nine months, they had a rotating door of CFOs for almost three years. It was a pretty chaotic environment, and yet the retention of the product was actually still pretty strong.”
Founded in 2006, Catapult’s core product is a wearable vest that allows professional sports teams to track performance and biometric data.The company has cut deals with 3,600 professional teams worldwide.Its other major revenue stream comes from video analytics, which teams use to review game footage.
On Wednesday, Catapult reported US$116 million ($179 million) in annual revenue — up 19% year-on-year. Losses after tax halved to US$8.56 million, bringing the company closer to profitability.
Catapult listed in 2014 and climbed to a valuation above $1 billion in 2016, but by early 2019 its market cap had plunged 80% from its peak.Lopes — a US executive from
Amazon’s Audible division — joined in November that year, shortly before the Covid pandemic hit.
Though the pandemic posed a serious challenge for a company built around live sport, the following years were even harder. As tech stocks collapsed and markets favoured profit over growth, investors punished companies that didn’t aggressively cut costs. Under Lopes, however,Catapult increased capital expenditure.
“The pressure was significant,” Lopes said. “I was very honest with the board… I said it’s going to take some investment during a period where no one wants to hear that we’re investing. I’m going to be an incredibly unpopular CEO, the business is going to be incredibly unpopular as a stock. And the board believed in the vision.”
While some of that investment went into R&D, a significant portion was spent reorganising the business. A series of acquisitions had left Catapult with overlapping engineering teams and sales teams unsure about how it all meshed together.
Those years were spent unifying eight different tech stacks into a single platform, rethinking branding, spending more on marketing and expanding the finance team to improve modelling.
Crucially, according to Wilson Asset Management portfolio manager Shaun Weick, Lopes transitioned Catapult to a software-as-a-service(SaaS) model.
“When you’re not a SaaS-based subscription model you’ve got to keep growing your sales staff to keep growing the top line,” said Weick,whose firm holds a position in Catapult. “He rebuilt the sales engine so it’s scalable — so when you’re adding this incremental ACV, the costs aren’t growing with it, which was always the issue in the past.”
Lopes also revamped the executive team. The longest-serving member of the current C-suite is chief people officer Zoe Rumford, who joined in 2021. Chief product and technology officers came on board in 2022,with CFO Bob Cruickshank
following in 2023. The most recent addition is chief revenue officer Chris Smith.
Catapult is now only about a 20% rise away from joining the ASX200, Weick noted. But while Lopes might be entitled to a moment of celebration, the work is far from done.
The company’s restructuring has pushed it past an “inflection point” —meaning more new revenue now drops to the bottom line — but Catapult has yet to post a full year in the black. Management has set an ambitious target of US$1 billion in annual revenue by 2030, which will require significant uptake of new products and broad expansion of its customer base.
“It’s nice to see where we are today, but success, particularly with equities, is never a straight line,” Lopes said. “Some days the market’s going to hate you, some days it’s going to love you.”
