Rise in pre-tax profits at Premier Farnell
ELECTRONIC components supplier Premier Farnell is expecting to boost its financial performance after reporting a rise in pre-tax profits.
The Leeds-based group has today posted a total pre-tax profit of
£38.1m, compared to £31.8m – a 19.8% increase on the previous year in its first half of the financial year ending February 2 2014.
Premier Farnell, which took home the Exporter award at this year’s Yorkshire Business Masters, reported revenue of £498.2m from £479.2m last year and said group sales per day up 0.9% versus the prior year. Sales excluding credit card-sized computer Raspberry Pi declined 1.4% as overall market conditions remained subdued.
Laurence Bain, chief executive officer, said: “Our core business has delivered a stable performance overall despite the mixed conditions that have impacted some developed markets such as North America and the UK. Focus on optimising performance saw the group’s industry leading operating margin improve from the levels experienced at the end of the prior year, making progress towards our targeted range.
“Our customer-centric strategy has attracted more customers to our
business and provides the group with greater opportunity as market conditions improve. Progress in the emerging markets, where sales growth outpaced our target, exemplifies this approach. We continue to enrich our customer proposition through investments in inventory and our new web platform, making good progress through the first half this year in the execution of these plans which are driving record levels of customer satisfaction and service performance. We remain confident in our ability to implement our strategic vision.
“Looking ahead to the second half, we continue to have limited forward order visibility and current market conditions remain variable. However, with our proposition benefitting from the first half inventory investments and initiatives taken to optimise business performance, we expect to continue to grow our active customer base, gain market share and drive financial performance.”
The group said that over the longer term, the world’s emerging markets present the group with the greatest opportunity for accelerated sales growth and developing its business in Asia Pacific is critical to achieving this strategic objective.
In the first half, emerging markets delivered sales growth of 14.8% year on year.
The company also announced today the appointment of Peter Ventress as one of the firm’s non-executive directors. Ventress is currently the CEO of Berendsen and prior to this he was international president of Staples.
