Good morning! It's Friday the 13th.

There aren't a huge number of exciting news announcements today, so I'll probably circle back to announcements from earlier this week. Paul is also doing a bonus report to cover Trakm8 Holdings (LON:TRAK) and some stories he missed during the week. His report is at this link.

Announcements today:

Announcements from earlier this week for financial stocks:



XP Power (LON:XPP)

  • Share price: 36.50 (+4%)
  • No. of shares: 19 million
  • Market cap: £701 million

Trading Statement

XP Power makes and supplies a wide range of AC-DC power supplies and converters worldwide.

It has been a high-performing stock and is now beyond our traditional market cap limits for this report. Some of our readers continue to hold it from lower levels, so I like to keep an eye on it!

This is just a short update for Q1, keeping us updated for progress to the end of March. The most important point is probably that expectations for the full year remain unchanged.

The Company has made a good start to the new financial year as the strong order intake reported in 2017 continued into 2018. Order intake in the first quarter of 2018 was £51.2 million (2017: £47.0 million), 9% ahead of Q1 2017 on a reported basis or 19% ahead in constant currency.

On a “like for like” basis, removing currency effects and the impact of the Comdel acquisition, orders increased by 12%.

All of these growth rates remain encouraging. I think the 12% number is the most important one - this is the organic growth rate at constant currencies.

We can see that a strengthening pound is hurting the reported figures, with a 10% negative disparity between reported growth (9%) and constant-currency growth (19%).

Let's compare the above statement on order intake with the equivalent one from a year ago, in April 2017:

Order intake in the quarter was also very encouraging at £47.0 million (2016: £30.3 million), up 55%…

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