LONDON (Alliance News) - Utilitywise PLC Tuesday said it acquired Czech Republic's ICON Communication Centres for roughly EUR2.3 million, while saying it doubled pretax profit in its first half and expects full-year performance slightly ahead of expectations.
The utility cost-management consultancy said its pretax profit increased to GBP4.0 million for the six months ended January 31 from GBP2.0 million the previous year as revenues also doubled to GBP21.0 million from GBP10.2 million.
The company said its revenues increased as its customer base increased 36% to 17,903, and it successfully integrated recent acquisitions to create a new Utility Management Services Division, which delivered GBP4.5 million in revenue.
In February, the company preliminarily announced that its revenues and adjusted pretax profit were slightly above management expectations in the first half of its financial year and well above year-earlier levels.
As such, Utilitywise proposed a 1.2 pence interim dividend, a 50% increase on its 0.8 pence interim dividend the previous year.
However, the company did note its administrative expenses more than doubled to GBP5.0 million from GBP2.4 million and its cost of sales also doubled to GBP11.9 million from GBP5.9 million the previous year.
Despite this, Utilitywise said it expects performance in its full year to be slightly ahead of current market expectations due to improvements in all of its key metrics.
The company separately announced on Tuesday that it has acquired ICON Communication Centres, based in the Czech Republic for roughly EUR2.3 million.
Utilitywise said the initial consideration payable is roughly EUR1.1 million in cash with a commitment to issue 30,701 new shares in Utilitywise at an issue price of 321.7 pence per share.
The company said a further EUR1.2 million will become payable by April 30, 2015, in cash and shares, subject to ICON meeting certain targets in the twelve months ended December 31, 2014.
ICON provides multilingual contact centres for the international market and currently operates one call centre with 150 employees and it reported revenues of GBP3.0 million in 2013.
Utilitywise said the acquisition has helped it to expand its relationship with Total SA of France, with two new contracts with Total Gas & Power to be delivered by the company's new Prague operations. The contract initial terms run to the end of 2016.
Utilitywise shares were up 3.9% to 332.54 pence Tuesday.
By Tom McIvor; tommcivor@alliancenews.com; @TomMcIvor1
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