Australia has made a strong contribution to record 17% Asia-Pacific revenue growth for Kofax, however reduced global software sales in the second half of 2011 caused a sharp drop in the company's share price after it announced its annual results.

The supplier of document scanning and business process automation software announced $US128M annual revenue for the year up to June 301 2011, with Asia Pacific contributing $US18.2M - split evenly between software licenses and maintenance and professional services.

Overall  Kofax revenues grow 12 per cent, however its warning that  that revenue growth had slowed in the second half of the year caused the share price to drop.

Kofax is currently listed on the London stock exchange, however it has moved its headquarters to the US and plans to dual list in the US, where it says investors have a better understanding of software companies.

Reynolds C. Bish, Kofax Chief Executive Officer, said: “We experienced strong revenue growth during the first half of the past year but less during the second half. As stated in our July trading update, we believe this slowdown was caused by longer sales cycles and decision making that emerged as a result of increasing uncertainty and volatility in the global economic environment. We expect these challenges to continue until more confidence and stability return to markets.”

He pointed towards the continuing push for the “paperless” office and the rising flood of communications flowing into organisations as strong drivers of growth.

“The new “digital culture” increasingly expects more immediate responses and there are mounting pressures to reduce costs while improving responsiveness, information quality and compliance”

Kofax says  it is now closing more six and seven figure sales, including two of the largest in the history of the company: a $US4.5 million sale to a global business process outsourcing (BPO) company with a presence in Australia; and $US3.0 million sale to a US federal government agency.

Kofax has a long term ambition to target the ad hoc content capture market, presently dominated by Nuance with 48.9% market share, according to industry analysts Harvey Spencer Associates.

The same report found that Kofax market share of the entire capture market had grown to 15.2%, placing it second after Nuance at 15.6%.

Kofax has claimed top position in batch image capture (34.7%, EMC/Captiva in second place with 15%); as well as batch content capture (16.7%, Readsoft comes in second with 10.6%).