Good afternoon!
I updated yesterday's report in the evening for interim results from Inspired Energy (LON:INSE) - a business which looks like a smaller version of Utilitywise (LON:UTW) . Please click here to see that article.
I'm running a bit late today, so will update this article throughout the afternoon.
Costain (LON:COST)
Share price: 367p (up 5.9% today)
No. shares: 102.0m
Market cap: £374.3m
Interims to 30 Jun 2015 - the market has reacted positively, with the shares up nearly 6% today, reaching a new post-credit-crunch high - so nice for people who like paying more for their shares, on breakouts!
Revenue is up 17.4% to £621.1m (NB. six months figures)
Underlying operating profit is £13.1m - up 17.0% - note that's a tiny profit margin, at only 2.1% (although there was an H2 weighting to profits in 2014, and 2.6% was achieved in the FY 2014)
Adjusted EPS is 9.6p, up 4.3%, which has been impacted by the increased number of shares in issue (the weighted avg [fully diluted] has risen from 91.7m a year ago, to 104.7m now), being the tail end of the dilution effect from a £75.1m fundraising in 2014, which I reported on here.
Order book - good news here, as they report a record order book of £3.7bn, up 16%.
Segmental information - note 3 to today's accounts is interesting, as it shows that the Natural Resources division has performed badly, with a loss of -£7.4m (compared with a loss of -£2.6m in H1 last year), but this has been more than offset by good profit growth from their Infrastructure division (key figures highlighted below);
Also, note that the biggest part of Costain, its Infrastructure division makes a reasonable profit margin (before central costs) of 5.1%, so that addresses my main concern with this business, of its margins being too low. So for me the key issue now is finding out what they are doing to eliminate the losses at the Natural Resources division?
Dividends - the interim divi is up 15% to 3.75p, which looks consistent with broker forecast of 10.1p for the full year, as historically the final divi has been just under double the interim divi, which seems to confirm the seasonal bias towards H2 trading mentioned above.…
