Anpario Share News (ANP)

LONDON (Alliance News) - Anpario PLC hiked its full year dividend Wednesday after its profit widened as a result of sales growth across all its regions.

In 2017, pretax profit widened to GBP3.4 million from GBP2.7 million the year prior. This was after revenue grew to GBP29.2 million from GBP24.3 million the year before.

Anpario - a natural animal feed additives maker - proposed a 4.5 pence final dividend, lower than the 5.5p dividend distributed the year before. For the full year, however, the dividend increased 18% to 6.5p from 5.5p the year before.

"Anpario delivered a very strong performance with growth in both revenue and profit," Anpario Chairman Peter Lawrence said. "These results endorse our strategy of recruiting regional commercial teams and unifying our brands under the Anpario name. It is encouraging to see sales growth across all our regions and improved gross margin as the proportion of sales direct to the end user has increased through using our wholly owned subsidiaries. Moreover, our average sales price has risen as the proportion of sales of higher value added products has increased reflecting the success of our more targeted sales initiatives."

"The company is maintaining the progress of last year," Lawrence said. "However, as Anpario is an international business it is not immune to the effects of currency movements. The recent strengthening of sterling against some major currencies has created a headwind and we are cautiously watching the movement in raw material prices which might be mitigated by both our production automation and route to market."

"Our strong balance sheet and reliable cash generation provide Anpario with a platform to invest in growth for the future and to seek out selective earning enhancing acquisitions," Lawrence added. "Overall, I remain optimistic and look forward with confidence to reporting further progress in our interim results."

Shares in Anpario were 0.4% lower at 419.49 pence on Wednesday.