ENGINEERING group Trifast has seen a return to profits boosted by increasing revenues and a strong performance in the UK market.
In its annual results released today, the Birmingham based group announced pre-tax profits of £2.52m, which overturned a loss of £2.81m for the year to March 31, 2010. Revenues grew from £85.94m this time last year to £106.09m for the year ended March 31, 2011.
The UK markets were especially strong for the group, with a £3m swing into profitability.
In a joint statement, chairman Malcolm Diamond and chief executive Jim Barker said: “Trifast has clearly enjoyed the best of the global recovery in customer demand catch-up for re-stocking, which now allows our strategy to develop market share to come into its own.
“These plans embrace most of our individual business teams across the group but with special focus on Asia, the UK and America, and we look forward to reporting our progress as we go through the year.”
Meanwhile, the board said it was impatient to fulfil its objective to fully restore Trifast to an “even more acceptable level of performance” by late 2012.
The group said the year had demonstrated the benefits of concentrating efforts on increasing top line sales performance.
It said this was reflected by a 23% rise in revenue during the year and while TR Asia achieved solid and profitable growth, the star performer in the year was the UK. Alongside this, revenue improvements combined with stable overheads saw operations in mainland Europe and the USA move from loss making to break-even.
In the UK, the group’s outstanding performer was its Lancaster Fastener subsidiary. Based in the North-West, the firm supplies UK and overseas distributors on a next day-delivery basis.
“It is the long established success of Lancaster’s business model, with its above average return on sales that has inspired us to develop TR Direct in order to provide next-day delivery to end users by closely managing predictable stock availability, along with high and consistent quality standards,” said the group.
The group’s Branded Products team, which sells fasteners for sheet metal and plastics mainly to UK and European distributors, also achieved double digit growth at above group average gross profit margin.
Trifast said it was also encouraged by the performance of its manufacturing units in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and China.
The group is now seeking additional opportunities for growth and capital investment in these areas.
In addition, it is broadening its geographic reach into India, Thailand and Vietnam.
The year also saw the group expand its automotive operations with the opening of its Automotive Centre of Excellence in Holland. The benefits of this are expected to start feeding through during the coming financial year.
