The ASX-200 index fell 0.3% today, and there were clearly winners and losers in today’s session. Materials, Resources, Mining, and Industrials closed the day in the green, while most other sectors were flat or in the red zone. Consumer Staples was the worst performing of the lot and it weighed on the market index.
Brickworks was the best-performer with a 11% surge and set a record high as the firm announced a profit upgrade. Whitehaven Coal, Nanosonics, and IOOF were the other big performers today. Tech giants Appen and Altium continued to lag along with WiseTech Global. Altium, the company caught in the thick of a potential M&A deal, was the worst performer with a 7.5% decline.
While inflation has been influencing markets in the past few weeks, it looks like some of the fears are easing and a rebound in several technology and other growth stocks can be seen. With several growth stocks on the ASX already corrected, opportunities are once again starting to appear.
Our List of ASX Shares to be in your watchlist
Nearmap Limited (ASX: NEA)
Barangaroo headquartered Nearmap Ltd. operates as an online photo map content company, which provides geospatial map technology for business, enterprises, and government customers. The firm operates its business across Australia, New Zealand, and North America. They provide these online photo maps to their customers via a subscription model and this makes it fairly straightforward to analyse the sustainability of their revenues. Back in May, Nearmap had 2 big announcements – one positive and another negative.
The company increased their FY21 Annual Contract Value (ACV) guidance to $128m-$132m (from $120m-$128m) on the back of a strong 1H21 performance. The growth momentum continued across its core industry verticals from both new and existing customers. This reinforces the attractiveness of the company’s subscription business model, the benefits of the Company’stechnology leadership position and the differentiated customer offering which combine to give Nearmap a significant competitive advantage.
Nearmap continues to invest the proceeds from the FY21 capital raise into key growth initiatives, including into the development of HyperCamera3, which remains on track to be rolled out in FY22. With each of the investment initiatives on track and with continued momentum in ACV growth, Nearmap now expects the net cash outflow to be less than $10m this financial year.
Here is the negative: there has been a complaint filed against its subsidiary, Nearmap US, Inc. in the United States DistrictCourt(District of Utah, Northern Division). The complaint alleges patent infringement relating to the roof-estimation technology.
This announcement resulted in the share price tumbling and NEA shares are now trading close to a 52-week low at $1.835 a share.
Dubber Corporation (ASX: DUB)
Melbourne based Dubber Corp. Ltd. offers cloud based call recording software technology and audio asset management. It also offers recording facility, playback, zoe, lab and dubber API. They are working with some of the heavyweights of the world such as Cisco and operate a SaaS business model. Dubber is the world’s most scalable Unified Call Recording service and Voice Intelligence Cloud adopted as core network infrastructure by multiple global leading telecommunications carriers in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Dubber allows service providers to offer call recording for compliance, business intelligence, sentiment analysis, AI and more on any phone.
In contrast to NEA shares, DUB shares have been very upbeat since March 2021. The company announced that it has extended its Unified Call Recording footprint with the global availability of Dubber with Zoom Video Communications earlier this year and this when the share price really started to lift-off. A major concern for businesses is meeting compliance obligations, regardless of the employee work location. Dubber’s technology is helping business users solve this problem and Cisco will now include Dubber call recording as part of all Cisco Webex and UCM services.
The Zoom and Cisco announcements have underpinned the positive sentiment in DUB shares and the future looks robust given how useful their technology is. DUB shares currently trade at $2.91 a share, close to its 52-week high.
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