Andor Tech Regulatory News (AND)

2 April 2012

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 first six months of the financial year ended 30 September 2012.

The Board is pleased to report that trading is in line with the Board's expectations. Asia Pacific continues to deliver strong growth in both order intake and sales.  The appointment of our APAC Head of Sales at the start of 2011 is bringing focus and drive to the sales effort allowing us to exploit the growth opportunities that exist throughout the region. Europe is performing well, against a difficult funding backdrop, and will also show growth over last year. As with other regions, new product development supported by channel expansion is driving success. As we said in February, order intake from the Americas in the first quarter was weaker than expected. While this situation improved in the second quarter we still expect the order intake from this region for the first half to be slightly down on the same period last year. It is important to note that no significant business has been lost. Rather, this is the result of more prudent stock management on behalf of our OEM customers who are predominantly based in the Americas.

We continue to focus on expanding the operating margin of the business. This is being achieved through the delivery of innovative, higher margin, higher premium products as well as engendering a deeper commercial focus throughout the business. We expect that margins will improve again in the first half of this financial year compared with the same period last year. 

We have released three new camera products during the period (sCMOS Neo R3, iXon Ultra and USB iStar) together with a number of components in our Systems Division and several new releases across our software portfolio. All have been well received by the market. Our ability to transition new product smoothly from engineering to operations is very pleasing and all of these products are already offered on standard lead-times.   

The global economic climate remains challenging. The impact of this is longer purchasing cycles in the research community and reduced stock holding by OEM partners. Andor will continue to address these challenges by continued investment in innovation and product delivery, by channel expansion and support, and by providing excellent customer service. Andor continues to be at the forefront of our market, continues to lead innovation and the Board remains confident about the prospects for the business for the full year.

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