Good morning! I spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon catching up on a report I'd missed last Monday. Didn't get as far as I liked, but it covers two companies results, YouGov (LON:YOU) and Spaceandpeople (LON:SAL). So the link to that report is here, for anyone interested.


Cenkos Securities (LON:CNKS)

Share price: 185p
No. shares: 58.0m
Market Cap: £107.3m

(at the time of writing I hold a long position in this share)

Final results - for calendar 2014. As expected, these numbers are excellent. Revenue was up 72% on prior year, at £88.5m, and profit before tax came in at £27.0m, up 152%. Basic EPS was up 148% to 35.2p, which is ahead of broker consensus estimate of 33.4p. Although diluted EPS is lower at 32.0p, so I'm not sure which measure the broker consensus is based on.

These are superb P&L numbers, which just goes to show how lucrative institutional broking is, in the good years when lots of fundraisings and IPOs are going on. Cenkos seem to be going from strength to strength, and raised 15% of all funds on AIM in 2014. It's also doing increasingly large deals too, such as the float of the AA in 2014, and a more recent big deal which I mentioned in last Friday's report, raising just over £1bn for Haversham.

Dividends - total divis for 2014 are 17p, for a remarkable yield of 9.2%. Important to remember that this is probably not sustainable, but at least it shows the company does pay out a decent amount in the good years.

The company also points out that 9% of its shares were bought back in Jan 2015, a material amount.

Outlook - sounds good;

55192068dc245CNKS.JPG

Balance sheet - is very strong. The current ratio was 2.41 at 31 Dec 2014, including £32.9m of net cash (some of which will have since been used for the share buyback).

My opinion - I fully appreciate that profits at this level are probably not sustainable for the long term, as their business is so cyclical & unpredictable. But 2015 is likely to be another bumper year, due partly to the Haversham deal. So I suspect that broker forecast for 2015 earnings could be revised up considerably, as current estimates show EPS…

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