LONDON (Alliance News) - LiDCO Group PLC on Tuesday reported a swing to a pretax loss for its most recent financial year as a number of sales slipped into its current year, and it said it has renewed its distribution contract with Argon Medical Devices Inc for a further five years.
LiDCO supplies monitoring equipment to hospitals.
For the year to end-January LiDCO reported a pretax loss of GBP578,000, swung from a pretax profit of GBP238,000 a year before, as revenue fell to GBP7.6 million from GBP8.3 million. LiDCO attributed the fall in revenue to a lower number of monitors sold and placed with hospitals.
The company sold or placed 10 monitors during the year, compared to 267 in the previous year. Sales of surgical disposable units fell 11% to 39,975 units from 44,758.
In the UK, a number of monitor sales slipped into the current financial year, and LiDCO said that in recent years purchases of disposables has been hit by the withdrawal of incentives for National Health Service hospitals to procure hemodynamic monitors and disposables. Sales in its Rest of the World segment were hit by long delays in the registration process in China, and LiDCO said it had received approval to start selling its products following the year end, in March.
LiDCO said it foresees its current year as a "year of sales growth and cash generation", and noted that whilst it expects to be profitable, it will continue to invest in its business to achieve growth opportunities it believes are available.
"Our main challenge going forward is not one of validation for our technology, but rather execution and ensuring that we have the resources to expand our product sales into the many countries where adoption of advanced hemodynamic monitoring is now occurring. We are making good progress with the strategy laid out in October 2015 and have plans to expand our commercial efforts to achieve significant top line growth," said Chief Executive Officer Matthew Sassone in a statement.
Shares in LiDCO were down 13% at 7.60 pence Tuesday morning.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; hanassmith@alliancenews.com; @HanaSSAllNews
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