VIQ Solutions has 72% upside: Echelon Wealth Partners

Following a potentially lucrative new partnership, Echelon Wealth Partners analyst Ralph Garcea is maintaining his bullish take on VIQ Solutions (VIQ Solutions Stock Quote, Chart, News: TSXV:VQS).

This morning, VIQ announced it will partner with University of Virginia Medical Center, a medical trauma centre, for VIQ’s satellite audio-video capture, management and collaborative Web portal solution.

“This collaborative project with the esteemed University of Virginia Medical Center is a significant win for VIQ in United States health care,” CEO Sebastien Pare said. “It is a partnership dedicated to enhancing the quality of care to trauma patients with our technology, which is focused on procedural and performance analysis. VIQ satellite securely captures multipoint audio-video (AV), and sensor data with several layers of added functionality, including cybersecurity, data analytics and a collaboration web portal,” said , president and chief executive officer of VIQ Solutions. This breakthrough materially advances VIQ’s growing international reputation in the markets we’re focused on, namely health care, public safety, justice and law enforcement. VIQ’s leading-edge digital-media solutions are designed to meet the exacting demands of these markets while maintaining the highest level of security and privacy for their digital content.”

Garcea says VIQ has the wind at its back.

“With increasingly more content being recorded and digitized in the cloud on a daily basis, VIQ has become a direct beneficiary of this trend,” the analyst says. “The Company focuses on developing software solutions with the highest level of cybersecurity that appeal to security and privacy conscious organizations that collect sensitive evidence-based digital data. The Company is technology agnostic with respect to the mode of data collection, which opens up a potentially wide partner universe with respect to each market segment it is servicing.”

In a research update to clients today, Garcea maintained his “Speculative Buy” rating and one-year price target of $0.50 on VIQ Solutions, implying a return of 72 per cent at the time of publication.

Garcea thinks VIQ will generate EBITDA of $1.6-million on revenue of $13.1-million in fiscal 2017. He expects those numbers will improve to EBITDA of $2.6-million on a topline of $17.6-million the following year.

Garcea says VIQ is cheap compared to its peers.

“VQS is currently trading at a C2018E EV/Sales of 1.8x and EV/EBITDA of 12.0x versus its Canadian small cap comparables at 1.8x/13.2x, and Video/Audio Capture and AI comparables at 5.9x/15.3x, respectively,” the analyst notes.