Good morning, and happy new year! It's Paul here.

It's another quiet day for results/trading updates.

Many thanks for the continued input from readers, in the comments sections after these articles. It's very useful & worthwhile, often adding information that Graham & I may not be aware of. I'm keen to see this develop more, as feedback I'm getting places a lot of importance on the quality of reader comments here. I think that here at Stockopedia we've already got a reputation for having the highest quality reader comments of any mainstream UK investing site. So it would be great to see that lead grow in 2018 to become unassailable!

On to today's news.




Staffline (LON:STAF)

Share price: 989p (down 2.1% today, at 08:30)
No. shares: 27.8m
Market cap: £274.9m

Trading update

Staffline, the Staffing and Employability organisation, today issues a trading update for its financial year ended 31 December 2017.


It's an in line result for the year;

The Board is pleased to report that the Group expects to deliver full year results in line with market expectations.


Other points;

Revenue of c.£962m for 2017, up 9% on 2016 (slightly short of £1bn long-term target, which doesn't really matter). Note that much revenue is pass-through - i.e. wages of contractors.

Staffing division is doing well.

Other activities sounds a bit mixed;

PeoplePlus, the Employability, Skills and Justice Division, has also made good progress, continuing to win new contracts as well as benefiting from its focus on improved margins, helping to offset reduced activity from the run off of the Work Programme.


I'm a bit concerned about the last point - I thought that the Work Programme (A govt scheme to get unemployed people back to work) was going to be extended with new contracts. So there's a question mark over that.

Results for 2017 are due out on 24 Jan 2018 - that's a superbly quick reporting schedule - why can't all companies produce their preliminary results this quickly? In my experience, rapid reporting is nearly always a sign of a well-managed business, with strong financial controls. The opposite is also usually true - slow reporting means that a company probably isn't very well managed.

Private investor presentation - Staffline also impresses for treating its private shareholders with equal…

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