Traditional markets help boost H1 revenues 6.6% for Trifast
BIRMINGHAM-based fasteners manufacturer Trifast has seen half year revenues rise almost 7% with strong performances in traditional markets of the United States and Europe helping to offset reduced income from its Asian operations.
Group revenue in the first six months reached £65.26m (2012: £61.25m), a rise of 6.6%, while underlying pre-tax profit was up 26.4% at £4.55m (2012: £3.60m). Gross margins continued to improve to 27.7%, up from 26% in the same period last year.
Basic earnings per share increased by 34.2% to 3.06p (2012: 2.28p) and an interim dividend of 0.40p per share will be paid to shareholders on April 18, 2014.
Within this, there were strong organic performances from TR UK (+11.1%), TR Europe (+9.7%), and TR USA (+13.2%). In contrast, TR Asia’s revenue overall was down 1.8% and reflected the loss of two component supply contracts.
However, it said that comparing the first half performance against the second half of last year, it had seen a very strong recovery of around 10.1% from TR Asia as it added a number of new business gains. TR UK, TR Europe and TR USA continued strong growth over the second half of last year, up 7.9%, 4.7% and 22.5% respectively.
Executive chairman, Malcolm Diamond and chief executive, Jim Barker said in a joint statement: “We are very reassured by the creditable organic performances achieved in the first half and the opportunities our teams are creating to secure additional growth for the remainder of the financial year and into 2015 and beyond.
“These combined with our ‘self-help’ and ‘Continuous improvement’ initiatives will continue to deliver positive gains.”
They said they were very encouraged by the number of new products and licenses recently won and this gave the business confidence in its future ability to deliver more.
“The board remains optimistic about trading across the company’s UK, Asian, European, and North American regions; buoyed by the current macro-economic recovery in a number of key global markets, in particular for us in the manufacturing and industrials sectors. The combination of these factors gives us confidence that we will now exceed our previous expectations,” they added.
