One Horizon Soars on New China Deal

By Chris Lange Updated Jan 13, 3:35PM EST · Published Dec 30, 10:40AM EST

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One Horizon Soars on New China Deal — © Thinkstock

One Horizon Group Inc. (NASDAQ: OHGI) led the bulls in Wednesday’s session on news of a China deal. The company announced that it has upgraded its China mobile voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telco Aishuo to allow the purchase of communication-stickers. The decision to expand the commercial offering in China was made due to the overwhelming growth of Aishuo, with over 12 million downloads in the past nine months.

The company has a growth trajectory 18 months ahead of its forecast targets to acquire 15 million app subscribers over a two-year period. As a result, Aishuo revenues have increased for a third consecutive 100% growth quarter, accelerating the monetization strategy.

Aishuo communication-stickers are a mix of cartoons and smiley-like emojis. This mix gives users an addictive new way to communicate emotions and feelings with quirkiness. Using stickers is not only about being expressive, but saves users time over tapping out words on a phone, making communications easier and more rapid; particularly given that Chinese Hanzi is tricky to input digitally. Significant revenues have been seen in the sales of stickers in other social media and mobile apps around the world. The company believes that industry standard revenues can be achieved with this new sticker feature-set for Aishuo.
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Brian Collins, the CEO of One Horizon Group, noted:

Our deployment in China has exceeded all our internal forecasts and roll-out modeling. Now we’re pushing even further across the Chinese social media market with the addition of the massively popular sticker communication feature. Some stickers will be free of charge while others will have a small payment attached for those special expressions that our mobile subscribers may wish to share.

Shares of One Horizon were trading up 42% at $1.45 Wednesday, with a consensus analyst price target of $3.52 and a 52-week trading range of $0.90 to $5.84.

About the Author Chris Lange →

Chris Lange is a writer for 24/7 Wall St., based in Houston. He has covered financial markets over the past decade with an emphasis on healthcare, tech, and IPOs. During this time, he has published thousands of articles with insightful analysis across these complex fields. Currently, Lange's focus is on military and geopolitical topics.

Lange's work has been quoted or mentioned in Forbes, The New York Times, Business Insider, USA Today, MSN, Yahoo, The Verge, Vice, The Intelligencer, Quartz, Nasdaq, The Motley Fool, Fox Business, International Business Times, The Street, Seeking Alpha, Barron’s, Benzinga, and many other major publications.

A graduate of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Lange majored in business with a particular focus on investments. He has previous experience in the banking industry and startups.