Intertek Group Share News (ITRK)

LONDON (Alliance News) - Intertek PLC hiked its full-year dividend Tuesday after 2017 profit and revenue both grew strongly despite its resources unit experiencing declines as it continues to target faster growth in 2018 and beyond.

In 2017, pretax profit rose 15% to GBP331.3 million from GBP289.3 million the year prior. This was after revenue rose 14% to GBP467.7 million from GBP409.7 million the year before.

Intertek - a FTSE 100-listed industrial testing firm - proposed a 47.8 pence final dividend per share, up 11% from 43.0 pence the year before. That means that for the full year, the dividend rose 14% to 71.3 pence from 62.4 pence the year prior.

"The group has delivered continued progress in revenue, margin and free cash flow in 2017, reflecting the group's performance management discipline focused on margin accretive revenue growth and cash conversion to generate strong returns for our shareholders," Intertek Chief Executive Officer Andre Lacroix said.

"The Products and Trade related divisions, which represent 94% of the group's earnings, delivered an excellent performance with organic revenue growth of 4.8% at constant rates while, as expected, trading conditions remained challenging in the Resources related division," Lacroix added.

On an organic basis, revenue grew 5.5% for its Products unit, 3.0% for its Trade business and fell 8.6% for its resources unit.

On a reported basis, Products saw revenue grow 11% to GBP1.63 billion with adjusted operating profit GBP350.5 million up 18%. Trade revenue grew 5.6% to GBP647.8 million with operating profit up 8.4% to GBP88.7 million. Resources revenue fell 4.1% to GBP495.8 million with profit falling 5.6% to GBP28.5 million.

"We are confident about the structural growth prospects in the global Quality Assurance market," Lacroix said. "We are uniquely positioned to seize these attractive growth opportunities, underpinned by the increased complexities of corporate supply chains and the associated challenges of maintaining a high level of quality assurance end to end."

Intertek said the assurance industry was worth USD250 billion globally.

"We are moving the company's centre of gravity towards our industry's most attractive growth and margin areas with a disciplined approach to performance management and capital allocation", Lacroix added.

Shares in Intertek were 6.3% higher at 5,174.00 pence on Tuesday.