Escher Group Holdings Share News (ESCH)

Escher Group, which provides software services to the postal industry, gave an upbeat outlook on Monday as it delivered an eight per cent increase in revenue for 2013 after a 'robust year of development and growth'.Chief Executive Liam Church said that all its customers with contracts expiring in 2013 renewed them, with contract expansions in some instances."This is a great endorsement of the excellence and consistent performance of our solutions," he said.Meanwhile, the investment made to diversify Escher's technology offering during last year has already begun to generate contract wins, it said. Church added: "With the strong quality of our pipeline and technology, we are confident about the prospects for 2014 and beyond."Turnover totalled $24.7m last year, up from $23m the year before, mainly due to a 35% increase in software development and consulting services revenue from Pos Malaysia and the United States Postal Service.In November, Escher had to revise its estimate of when it will recognise $6m of revenue from a customer from the fourth quarter of 2013 to the first half of 2014. The company delivered the required software but is still waiting on the customer to deploy it to a sufficient number of workstations to trigger the full licence payment.Escher said: "The group continues to believe that this can be achieved in the first half of 2014. Escher remains pleased with progress on this project and the group is supporting the customer through its large and complex software deployment exercise."Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation fell by 34% in 2013 to $4.2m as a result of rising costs and the mix of revenue being in favour of lower margin services revenues. Net debt at the end of the year was more or less flat on 2012 at $2.3m.BC