20 February 2023

Vianet Group plc

("Vianet", "the Company" or "the Group")

Grant of Share Options

Vianet Group plc (AIM: VNET), an international cloud based provider of business intelligence and management software to the hospitality, unattended retail vending and remote asset management sectors, announces that on 15 February 2023 the Remuneration Committee approved the grant of a total of 450,000 share options  (the "Options") to James Dickson, Mark Foster, Stella Panu and David Coplin, Directors of the Company, over ordinary shares of 10 pence each in the share capital of the Company ("Ordinary Shares") under the Company's EMI Scheme.  In addition to long term incentive the award to James Dickson was also in recognition of forgone pension entitlement for FY22 and FY23 and to ensure that the Directors are appropriately remunerated.

The Options have an exercise price of 75.00 pence per ordinary share, being the closing midmarket price per ordinary share on 16 February 2023. Each of these Options vest after three years from the date of issue and are exercisable for a period of seven years from vesting and subject to the satisfaction of certain share price performance conditions. 

The breakdown of the grant of Options to each of the Directors is as follows:

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About Vianet

Vianet Group is a leading provider of actionable management information and business insight created through combining data from our Internet of Things ('IOT') solutions and external information sources.

Since its Admission to AIM in 2006, the Group has grown from its core beer monitoring business both organically and through strategic acquisitions to widen its offering and develop new businesses, especially in vending telemetry and contactless payment solutions particularly for the premium coffee sector.

Servicing over 300 customers across the world and rendering live data to our IOT platform from over 250,000 connected machines daily, Vianet is one of the largest business to business (b2b) connected solutions providers in Europe with established long-term relationships with blue chip customers and growing recurring revenues which are over 85% of our total revenues.

In our Smart Machines division, we connect a single data gathering device with its own on-board communication capability to a customer's asset or system. The device then sends data back via our IOT platform to cloud based servers. The technology was originally developed for automated retailing machines; however, the flexibility and functionality of the device means the technology can be applied to any machine which has the capability to output data. The device is also used to connect our contactless payment solution and communicate payment terms to our cloud-based payment services providers where that application is also required.

The Smart Zones division is where we connect multiple data gathering devices into one or more systems or assets with the data from those devices being communicated back to our IOT platform and cloud-based servers via a single 4G communications hub. The technology was originally developed for flow monitoring devices, temperature sensors, and asset management in drinks retailing but any data gathering device with a digital output could be connected to the communications hub where required such as gaming machines, utilities management and POS.

For further information, please visit www.vianetplc.com