LONDON (Alliance News) - Watchstone Group PLC on Friday reported a widened loss for 2017 and warned on challenges in its insurance brokerage business ingenie.
The IT service management company reported a pretax loss of GBP5.0 million for 2017, compared with a GBP3.4 million pretax loss the prior year. Revenue rose slightly to GBP44.9 million from GBP43.7 million, reflecting the lack of revenue from non-underlying businesses.
Administrative expenses, including impairment charges, increased to GBP27.7 million from GBP24.0 million the year earlier.
The company said that it remains on track to prepare its divisions for potential divestment for maximising shareholder value.
Watchstone's current businesses are Canada-based national healthcare company ptHealth, Canada-based clinic management software firm InnoCare and ingenie.
Of those operations, the company said that ptHealth and ingenie remain profitable with further opportunities for profit improvement from organic growth and margin enhancement.
Watchstone said ingenie generated revenue of GBP14.4 million in 2017, but had a challenging end to the year, as young driver market was affected by instability in motor policy pricing. These market challenges reflected in a reduction of the long-term growth forecast for the business, the company said, and resulted in an impairment charge of GBP5.6 million.
"The group enters 2018 a far simpler business and we expect this year will be a period of re-focus and development for ptHealth and ingenie. Both will be encouraged to invest ambitiously but prudently," said Chief Executive Stefan Borson.
