Nearmap boss Rob Newman charts growth offshore

Nearmap CEO Rob Newman says the aerial mapping company’s growth ‘comes from expanding geographies’.

Nearmap CEO Rob Newman says pushing boundaries is key to his company’s success.

Nearmap’s unlikely journey from “one guy in a flat in Perth” to one of the ASX’s 200 most valuable companies is one of the market’s recent success stories, and it is one that chief executive Rob Newman says is testament to what Australia can do for high-growth tech businesses.

Speaking on the sidelines of the company’s annual Navig8 summit in Melbourne, Dr Newman said the mapping company’s surge up the stockmarket — to a market capitalisation today of almost $2 billion — was proof positive that local companies can go global without having to shift their headquarters overseas.

“I believe we can have great high-growth technology companies grown here in Australia and keep them housed here,” Dr Newman said.

“It’s way easier than it was 20 years ago. If you look at the tech companies that do succeed here over the long term, they invest heavily back into their technology to keep at the forefront.”

Dr Newman said given the firm’s new-found stature as an ASX 200 company, it now had an obligation to keep growing its talent base and doing so in Australia.

“If you go to the US, you’re competing against the large FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet’s Google) companies but here in Australia there’s a great talent base coupled with strong innovation,” Dr Newman said. “We have struggled a bit with commercialisation of new technologies, but overall it is a great place to build out a management team and run a technology company.”

According to Dr Newman, the secret behind Nearmap’s recent success is not just its imaging technology or its business model, but the fact it is continuing to push boundaries by adding value to its content with a 3D offering, and insights delivered through artificial intelligence.

Nearmap, which in 2012 moved from Perth to its headquarters in Barangaroo in Sydney’s outer suburbs, flies multiple planes every day across Australia, the US and New Zealand.

They capture high-resolution aerial imagery that is then stitched together with software and uploaded to provide up-to-date maps for construction firms, councils and any business that needs access to a map.

Dr Newman said the company had one key metric it looks at — ACV, annualised contract value.

“For our last reported results, that was up 40 per cent year-on-year,” he said. “That’s our key metric and where our focus is.

“If we can keep that at 40 per cent, it means we double in size every two years basically. We’re only one of a few on the ASX growing at that rate, and it means we have the potential to be a global leader at what we’re doing.”

He said Nearmap had only about 1 per cent market share in the US, and it hadn’t yet taken on the Europe and Asian markets.

“We have a long path ahead of us,” he said. “The market is highly fragmented globally, we’re probably in the top three aerial imaging companies globally and that tells you something if we’re only 1 per cent in the US. Our aspiration is to be No 1 globally and we think with our subscription business model we’re able to grow our business faster than the others.”

When asked if Nearmap would build a consumer offering to rival Google Maps or Apple Maps, Dr Newman said smartphone and tablet users were already well served by free services.

“The growth for us comes from expanding geographies and going to new countries,” he said. “The other thing is adding even more insight and value to our product.”

Before joining Nearmap the executive worked in California for 10 years for a networking outfit, where he said he learned from the boom and bust of the late 1990s.

Like Nearmap, Dr Newman joined a company that had a small headcount but quickly grew to a couple of thousand employees.

“I still have very strong connections in Silicon Valley and a lot of those companies are great models for what we can do,” he said. “You look at Netflix, that’s not dissimilar to us, they create content and distribute it … We’re the Netflix of the real world.”