Phorm gives up on UK, Moves on to Brazil

We covered Phorm a lot last year when the company was in the spotlights for making a deal with ISP BT to trial advertising software on their network without the knowledge of their customers. The Phorm technology was used to gather information on a user’s websites and report back to the software for the sole purpose of sending out more targeted advertising to consumers who had no idea any of this was going on.

After details of the tests were revealed what seemed like promising support for Phorm from some of the country’s biggest providers began to fall apart. A large consumer group fought against the service which they felt was no better than computer installed adware on a massive scale. Now, it seems that Phorm are finally leaving any hopes of connecting with the UK market and moving on to Brazil.

Phorm’s UK gamble has lead to the company downsizing and cutting staff. It’s attempt to enter into other markets in Europe and Asia but hasn’t yet been able to crack any. Even its attempts at entering the Korean market have so far been unsuccessful for many of the same reasons that their UK attempt failed. Meanwhile, the company is still losing millions of dollars every year.

Phorm has made some inroads in Brazil, including selling rebranded Webwise software for over $1 million to a Brazilian telecoms provider, but it may still be some time before Phorm gets deployed on actual consumer ISPs, and even then there’s no guarantee it will be a successful venture. The company is moving most of its UK operations over to Brazil.

Kent Ertugrul, CEO of Phorm seemed unendingly optimistic about the company’s future:

“In summary, we believe Phorm is very well positioned for the next critical phase: demonstrating how all of the components of our model come together to create a strong, highly scalable, business. Whilst in the near-term, we expect that we will need to raise funds to take us into this next critical phase, based on current conversations, we are very confident that we will secure the funding necessary to do so.”

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