Good morning! A rather large backlog of emails has built up, so I apologise to anyone who is waiting for a response from me. Maybe people could hold fire on sending me any more emails for a few days, so I can catch up?!

KBC Advanced Technologies (LON:KBC)

Share price: 106p
No. shares: 81.8m
Market Cap: £86.7m

Interim results are out this morning covering the six months to 30 Jun 2014. The company is a consultancy and software supplier to the oil refinery sector, globally.

Balance Sheet - the strength of KBC's Bal Sheet is the first thing that jumps out at me from the figures. This has been helped by a relatively large Placing of £24m in May 2014, which was executed at 115p, just a 3p discount to the share price at the time - impressive. The share price is now 106p, so I like the fact that shares can now be bought at a lower price than the company was most recently financed at.

My only concern from the Bal Sheet is that Debtors looks too high at £30.1m. That's only a little less than the whole six month's turnover of £34.4m, and is £7m higher than the equivalent figures six and twelve months earlier. So the questions need to be asked - why is Debtors so high, and what it has been brought down to post year-end? Excessive debtors is my number one red flag for possible accounting problems, so this definitely needs looking into.

Acquisition - some of the Placing monies (£ 10m) was used to finance the acquisition of a UK competitor called FEESA in July 2014. So the 30 Jun 2014 Bal Sheet is flattered somewhat, but even when you strip out £ 10m in cash, it would still be very healthy, so a strong tick in the box for financial strength, which is always a great place to start.

Profitability - not particularly impressive, this has edged up a tiny bit from last year's H1, at £3.2m, on higher turnover. Note also the very high tax charge of £1.1m on £2.8m profit before tax - I recall there being a problem with this company whereby is generates profit in high tax countries, and losses in low tax countries, giving an unusually high blended tax rate. The FD was meant to be fixing this, but it doesn't seem to…

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