3 October 2011

ANDOR TECHNOLOGY PLC

("Andor")

Trading Update

Andor Technology plc (AND.L), a global leader in the development and manufacture of high performance scientific digital cameras for academic, industrial and government applications, today provides a trading update for the financial year ended 30 September 2011.

The Board is pleased to report that trading through the second half of the year has, as expected, continued to be strong, with each of our markets delivering excellent growth over the same period last year.

Revenue from the sCMOS Neo camera is growing in line with management expectation and we have increased production capacity such that lead-times are now reduced to four weeks. The camera has been well received by the research community and we have a large number of OEM customers evaluating the product. This process takes time, but we are confident our market leading sCMOS strategy will deliver growth for many years to come.

Our systems business continues to perform extremely well and we now expect sales in this division for the full year to be double those of last year. This success is driven by continued product investment in hardware and software, expansion of the sales channels and the hard work of our systems team.

Today we announce the launch of the Andor acceleration centre ("Certus"). Certus represents a £1m incremental investment in research and development resources at our Belfast headquarters and has two objectives: to bring additional products to market that are, at present, outside our standard technology roadmap; and to deliver those products to market in a faster timeframe than would normally be achievable.

The delivery of additional product is to be achieved through the investment in people, some of whom have been recruited from outside Andor, but many of whom have backfilled spaces created by our experienced in-house engineers joining Certus. It is expected that the acceleration will be achieved by isolation, increased working hours and each project being fully resourced from launch. It is planned to use Certus for high impact strategic products and we anticipate only one program running at any one time. The target for acceleration is to deliver the finished product in half the normal time.

We are also well advanced in the £1.5m expansion of our facility in Belfast. This will add production and engineering capacity as well as further project areas. As part of this investment we have upgraded our entire cleanroom to Class 1K and added additional specialist equipment which increases the current production capacity by at least 50%.   

The global economic climate remains challenging. It is therefore especially important to ensure our products are innovative and address fast-growing, well-funded applications. We have led the market over the past number of years by having a clear market driven strategy, by continuous investment and by searching for innovation in every aspect of our business. The investments outlined above are each focused on supporting the future growth of Andor and confirm the Board's confidence in the business going forward.  

The results for the year ended 30 September 2011 will be released on 28 November 2011.