Plus500 develops and operates an online trading platform for individual customers to trade contracts for difference (CFDs on approximately 2,800 underlying financial instruments in approximately 50 countries and 32 languages. Its trading platform is accessible from various operating systems, such as Windows, iOS, Android, and Surface, as well as web browsers. The company was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Israel with subsidiaries in UK, Cyprus, Australia, Singapore and Bulgaria.
The Company’s competitive advantage is in its proprietary technology, which provides the ability to rapidly implement changes to both its trading platform and marketing activities, resulting in a highly attractive and dynamic customer offering.
The Company is the largest CFD provider in the UK, Germany and Spain and is the top-rated mobile platform among CFD traders in Australia. It is penetrating new territories and benefits from sharp rises in market volatility that attract new customers to the platform.
The Company is very profitable, with high cash flow and high growth. It has just released (July 7, 2020) an initial statement about its H1 2020 financial reports (which will come out in August) in which revenues in the first half nearly quadrupled to $564 million USD. Plus500 said it had a record number of active customers in the three months to the end of June and that it had signed up 198,176 customers in the first half of the year, compared with 47,540 a year earlier.
The Company’s core policy is to return at least 60% of net profits to shareholders, through a combination of dividends and share buybacks, with at least 50% of this distribution being made by way of dividends. It declared a final dividend of $40.8 million for the year ended 31 December 2019 and a new share buyback programme was commenced in February 2020 to buy back up to $30 million of the Company’s shares.
