Hydraulics group hails 2022 as its year of recovery from pandemic
Flowtech Fluidpower, the Skelmersdale-based hydraulics group, returned to profit, in the annual period for 2021, it revealed today.
Revenues improved by 15% to £109.1m, while a pre-tax profit of £2.879m, was up from a pre-tax loss of £2.148m in 2020.
Meanwhile, net debt increased from £11.6m in 2020, to £15.4m in 2021.
The board will be recommending a dividend of 2p per ordinary share at the annual general meeting on June 1.
Flowtech said, as anticipated, 2021, was a year in which the business recovered strongly from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, while revenue was 15% up on 2020, it remained marginally below levels achieved in 2018 and 2019.
An underlying operating profit of £5.7m compared with £1.1m in 2020, while the operating profit of £3.7m was £5.1m in excess of 2020, but remains below the £5.7m achieved in 2019.
The company said the benefits of cost base restructuring activities undertaken over the past two years, limited the impact of inflationary and supply chain related pressures.
It also said strong progress was made with plans to develop an e-business platform and it successfully aggregated the Flowtech businesses at the start of 2022.
The company said 2022 is expected to be the year in which the business demonstrates a full recovery and delivers growth compared with pre COVID-19. It said it has made an encouraging start to the year, with revenue and gross margin ahead of expectations.
Chair, Roger McDowell, said: “I would like to thank all my colleagues across the group for all their efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic; it is a great credit to them that, despite the obvious difficulties in managing a multi-site organisation across four countries, the group exits the pandemic having made significant progress against its strategic goals.
“By the end of the year we believe that most of the key components of our strategic plan will be in place with the business benefiting from solid foundations enabling us to move forward aggressively to unlock our undoubted growth potential in both offline and, increasingly, online markets.”
