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LONDON (Alliance News) - Specialist engineering and technology recruiter Matchtech Group PLC on Thursday said its pretax profit and revenue grew in the first half of its financial year thanks to the contribution from the Networkers International business it acquired, but underlying trading proved weaker.
Matchtech said its pretax profit for the six months to the end of January increased to GBP6.9 million from GBP5.1 million on a statutory basis. Revenue grew to GBP297.9 million from GBP220.2 million and the group's net fee income increased to GBP36.5 million from GBP22.5 million.
On an underlying basis, however, which assumes Networkers was part of the company in the prior year, pretax profit grew only slightly to GBP9.4 million from GBP9.1 million. Revenue dipped on an underlying basis to GBP297.2 million from GBP298.0 million, while net fee income declined to GBP35.9 million from GBP36.2 million.
Matchtech declared an interim dividend of 6.00 pence per share, up from 5.68p.
Matchtech said its trading performance was in line with its expectations, with engineering and telecoms markets remaining solid in the half but offset by some weakness in technology recruitment. The IT segment suffered in particular, Matchtech said, but it has put in place plans to try to improve the performance of the business.
Matchtech said the integration of Networkers, which it acquired in January 2015 in a GBP57.9 million deal, remains on track to be largely completed by the end of Matchtech's financial year at the end of July.
"Demand for skilled engineers remains strong in the UK. Having identified a number of opportunities to roll out our engineering recruitment services internationally, we have taken the first practical steps to realise sales synergies through our new overseas network, with some encouraging initial results," said Brian Wilkinson, Matchtech's chairman.
"Investment in headcount is continuing in these areas as we aim to build market share and I remain confident that we will convert these exciting opportunities into significant growth over the next few years," he added.
By Sam Unsted; samunsted@alliancenews.com; @SamUAtAlliance
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