I Read The News Today Oh Boy! 19-Mar-2018

19th Mar '18 by matylda

4 comments 5055 reads

Morning all!

Hope you all had a great weekend.

Finsbury Food ( Finsbury Food (LON:FIF) ) – 116p – £151.2m – PER 11.2

Interim Results For The 26 Weeks To End December 2017 – Revenue of £157.8m up 0.7% (H1 2016: £156.6m), Operating Profit Margin of 5.5% (H1 2016: 5.3%), PBT of £8.4m up 6.3% (H1 2016: £7.9m), Adjusted Diluted EPS up 4.3% at 4.8p per share (H1 2016: 4.6p per share), Interim Dividend up 10% to 1.1p (H1 2016: 1.00p) and Net Debt is £16.6m (H1 2016: £21.0m).

Seems just about OK to me, not enough to get me invested though.

Gama Aviation ( Gama Aviation (LON:GMAA) ) – 260p – £165.4m – PER 10.8

Final Results For The 12 Months To End December 2017 – In-line with Revenue of $207.4m (2016: $196.1m) up 5.8% (CC), Underlying Operating Profit $18.7m (2016: $14.6m) up 28.3% (CC), Net Debt down by $6.4m to $13.0m (2016: $19.4m) and current trading is in line - Well placed to achieve its expectations for the current year.

Done very little in the past 5 years except go sideways, I just can’t get excited here at present.

Learning Technologies ( Learning Technologies (LON:LTG) ) – 83p – £476.5m – PER 39.4

Preliminary Results For The 12 Months To End December 2017 – Revenue up 85% to £52.1m (£28.3m last time), Adjusted EPS up 74% to 2.064p (1.184p last time), the FY Dividend is up 43% to 0.3p and there’s now Net Cash of £1.0m (-£8.5m last time). Current trading is ahead of expectations.

Finding it hard to ignore this, even on a lofty PER, it’s going on the Watchlist, 75p.

Miton ( Miton (LON:MGR) ) – 38.63p – £66.7m – PER 11.7

Final Results For The 12 Months To End December 2017 – Impressive enough, AuM up by 21% for the year at £3,361 million (2016: £2,783 million), Adjusted PBT up by 33% to £6.8M (2016: £5.1 million), Dividend of 1.4p, up 40% reflecting confidence in future prospects and momentum in AuM with Cash of £19.9m (2016: £21.3 million).

I think if the yield was higher I would be…

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MrContrarian

19th Mar '18

My morning smallcap tweet:

Accrol Group (LON:ACRL), Spectra Systems (LON:SPSY), Telit Communications (LON:TCM), Petards (LON:PEG), Staffline (LON:STAF)

Accrol Group (ACRL) warns FY materially below market expectations with posttax before any asset impairment charges -£13m. Blames costs, difficulty in increasing prices (no shit Sherlock). "Some of the corrective, business critical remedial activities have been hampered while the Board transitioned to its new supportive composition" What? Guides next FY in line. Whatever.
Spectra Systems (SPSY) FY EPS 7c (3c). FY div 6c (5c). Net cash 11.1m ($8.8m). "Excellent prospects for ongoing earnings growth in 2018."
Telit (TCM) appeal against tax penalty of €5m rejected, will appeal.
Petards Group (PEG) MOD Air Platform Systems Platform Protection team exercises option to extend contract, worth in excess of £1.6m over 2 yrs.
Staffline Group (STAF) buys Endeavour Group and its subsidiary Vital Recruitment having T/O £83m and pretax of a miserable £0.5m. Expected to be earnings neutral in the current year. How much have they paid? It's a secret. I hold.

matylda

Liking the Accrol Group (LON:ACRL) write up - Ha!

andrea34

I think there is a reason why Spectra Systems (LON:SPSY) are somewhat vague about the exact nature of their product... and that I feel is because:

It is, potentially, a niche product that they don't want to be exploited by competitors,
More importantly, the primary purpose of their product is to prevent fraud... and if they reveal in any detail what they do, then all the nasty fraudulent people out there will figure out ways around their product features.

From reading between the lines, their primary product is specialised printing technologies (which are either produced or licensed for production) for bank notes, and high-speed readers to detect optical security features to determine that they are genuine.

I hold, but I am slightly disappointed at the single-digit increase in revenue - the profit increase seems to have come from reduced costs as much as anything else.

JamesrWilson1989

Worth noting in relation to Miton (LON:MGR) that whilst the dividend is growing, it could be higher.

However, looking a bit deeper, I think the business has been very generous with shareholders in the past year.

Dividend cover is 2.34. The dividend of 1.4p is costing the business £2.1M, but they have also bought & cancelled £6M of shares this year, which would roughly equate to 4.2p per shareholder. The combined total of dividend & share cancel is therefore roughly 5.6p a share (so 10% growth for the shareholder). Net cash has only marginally dropped from £21.3M to £19.9M as a result of this.

To conclude, whilst the share price has gone sideways the past year, this might not give a full account of the business.

I Read The News Today Oh Boy! 19-Mar-2018

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Matylda

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