“By combining this capacity with our own technology we were able to revolutionise the relationship between coaches and players. Instead of simply watching play live or in replay, coaches can now get real-time insights into why play is going a certain way, or why their tactics aren’t working. For example, they can see objectively when an athlete is too exhausted to continue playing at their best. They can also collect video from different games and different opponents, analyse it and then communicate their findings to the team,” he adds.

Opportunities for growth

Bringing the two core platforms together created the opportunity for Catapult to transition from selling wearable technology to Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. As a result, its investor relations (IR) strategy has focused on helping investors to understand why the software is more important than the hardware,  the size of the addressable market and opportunities for growth.

“When I joined the company there were a lot of questions around whether our technology would only appeal to very elite teams,” says Lopes. “This definitely isn’t the case. We think about our market as having three tiers – professional and elite, followed by organisations such as youth academies, high schools and collegiate teams in the US, then enthusiastic athletes who are buying for themselves.

“The desire to understand how an athlete is coming along and how to avoid injury is pretty universal so the difference tends to lie in the level of analysis they want to do. An elite team requires very different processing power from the other two, so it was easy for us to make Catapult affordable at every level.”

Catapult’s recent results showed growth across the three tiers – and the growth was significant. Annualized Contract Value (ACV), Catapult’s leading SaaS metric, grew globally at a 35 per cent annualised rate during the second half of FY21, far exceeding pre-COVID FY20 growth of 12 per cent over the past two years. “We’re very proud of this, especially as, during the pandemic, sport was completely shut down,” says Lopes.

Global appeal

An equity raise of about US$15 million, supported the acquisition of SGB and accelerated both product development and the transition to SaaS.

“As a result, the integrated wearables and video product went to market about seven months earlier than we expected,” says Lopes. “Overlay that with challenges associated with COVID such as inflation, labour shortages and problems with supply chain and it was a phenomenal achievement. The equity raise was oversubscribed by a huge margin and we feel we can fund our accelerated growth initiatives for the next few years.”

As 95 per cent of Catapult’s revenue comes from outside Australia Lopes is keen for the investor community to become a more accurate reflection of the company’s global success. “I think our potential lies in increasing international ownership,” he says.

Plans for the future

One new area of focus is developing a more predictive product for the elite market.

“Rather than showing what just happened or what’s happening now, we’d like to show coaches what’s about to happen so they can make smarter decisions in real time,” says Lopes.

Other tiers offer opportunities for a more prescriptive approach. 

“The coach of a high-level team doesn’t want to be told what to do, but when you move down into the youth market, coaching staff are typically limited due to lack of resources,” says Lopes. “Here, information about players’ exhaustion levels and who you might want to rest for a week can be very helpful, and very welcome.”

Catapult is committed to maintaining its focus on the athlete.

“We have lots of requests to use the data in different ways,’ Lopes says. “Inevitably, our interest in predictability has attracted the attention of the betting industry, but we have decided not to go down that route. We have developed our own ethical guidelines, and our purpose is to maintain the trust of our athletes and our teams by supporting them, not exploiting them.”

Catapult is continually fine-tuning its responses to broader ESG issues.

“As you can imagine, a combination of sports and tech isn’t the most naturally diverse environment so we have worked very hard, particularly over the past two years, to create some equality internally,” Lopes says. “We’re also very conscious of working with appropriate suppliers and taking steps to become more sophisticated when it comes to reporting.”

Recently, Lopes oversaw a redesign of all of the packaging in the system.

“We changed it to 100 per cent recyclable and removed as much plastic as possible,” he says. “That was really well received by investors. It showed us just how keen they are to know whether a company is behaving as a good global citizen.”