LONDON (Alliance News) - Torotrak PLC said Thursday that it has made "good progress" on its objectives since it acquired Flybrid Automotive Ltd in January, in a statement released ahead of its annual general meeting.
These objectives included bring its Flybrid kinetic energy recovery system to market earlier, beginning with buses, establishing low volume manufacturing capabilities, introducing high profile, low volume show cases for its technology, and establishing licensed manufacturing partnerships.
Since the start of the new financial year April 1, the company said it had made progress on all of these objectives. It has installed its first Flybrid KERS in a Wrightbus StreetLite bus.
It is on track to begin KERS trials in a bus on a public route with Arriva PLC in the third quarter of the year. It is continuing to build its pipeline for the product in buses.
The company is scaling up its manufacturing capability at its Leyland facility ahead of wider bus fleet trials it has scheduled for the first quarter of 2015, and the start of commercial production by the end of 2015.
The company said its next stage engineering programme with Allison Transmission Inc is on track to achieve GBP1 million in deferred licenses fees in the fourth quarter of the year.
Torotrak has continued to engage with original equipment manufacturers across all of its product areas. It estimates that the minimum development time to market is around three years, meaning that to achieve its objectives, it needs to sign up 'Tier 1' manufacturers between this financial year and the year to end-March 2016.
"The new team has great confidence in achieving the objectives as outlined to shareholders at the time of the Flybrid acquisition," said Chief Executive Jeremy Deering in a statement.
Shares in Torotrak were trading up 0.3% at 18.55 pence Thursday morning.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; hanassmith@alliancenews.com; @HanaSSAllNews
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