Sales more than double to £35m at fast-growth manufacturer

Revenues have nearly tripled to £35.4m at microwave electronics manufacturer Filtronic – showing 160% growth year-on-year.

The Yeadon-based company returned the massively increased sales in the year to May 2017, up from £13.6m in the year before. It said this was mainly down to a large order for its ultra wideband antennas for a single customer.

It is also back in the black, following pre-tax losses of £700,000 in 2016, it made £2.2m in profits this year.

The future looks bright for the manufacturer, which is predicting strong demand for filter products to infrastructure and public safety communications markets into 2018.

It said that the growth of 5G technology would also bolster demand in future.

Reg Gott, chairman of the microwave electronics manufacturer, said: “Both our Filtronic Wireless and Filtronic Broadband businesses have made excellent progress over the past year toward our key strategic objectives of broadening our customer base and expanding our product portfolio in order to widen our addressable market and return the Company to profit.

“Notwithstanding this progress, we are still in the early stages of this strategy and the bulk of our revenues will remain concentrated across a small number of customers in the mobile telecommunications infrastructure market for the near term.

“Following several years of growth in mobile infrastructure investment, we note recent market announcements by Nokia and Ericsson that 2017 may be slightly more challenging than they previously expected.

“However, we remain confident in our underlying strategy as market focus increasingly turns to 4G network densification and the nascent 5G opportunity to meet ever growing data capacity demand.

“We are confident these trends will play to our core strengths and position us well to capitalise on these opportunities as both 4G densification and 5G technology requirements align with our growing activities in the defence, public safety and satellite communications segments of the market.”

No dividend was proposed for the year, with the board deciding that, whilst cash reserves had increased substantially through the year, shareholders would be better served by retaining the cash to fund further investment plans.