EMIS recovers from NHS contract breach to score profit growth

(Sharecast News) - EMIS Group said on Friday that its profits grew by a fifth in the first half of the year despite the company facing penalties of several million pounds over failure to deliver on NHS contracts.The healthcare software company said the six months ended 31 June yielded pre-tax profits of £13.1m, up 22% from the same period last year, driven by 7% growth in total revenue to £84.5m over the period, as results comfortably met management's expectations.Following the strong financial showing, EMIS' interim dividend was increased by 10% to 14.2p a share.At 31 June, the AIM-listed company had cash and cash equivalents of £32.3m, up from £10.5m at the same point last year.Chief executive Andy Thorburn said: "We made encouraging progress in the first half in line with the board's expectations, delivering further revenue growth and an improvement in profits, despite our investment in Patient and our legacy-related service execution. With a strengthened senior leadership team now in place and further growth in recurring revenues, we remain confident of delivering on our expectations for the year as a whole."The company's software and software licences sector saw the biggest revenue improvement over the period, a 17% jump to £32m, while software services, hosting and hardware revenues also grew.Elsewhere, the group was confident that any settlement with NHS Digital would be within previously estimated ranges after the company had to deploy 93 staff to tackle "service level reporting issues" over the period.The company said in January that it expected to take a hit in the "upper single digits of millions pounds" over its failure to meet contractual requirements accross three categories in the supply of its Emis Web GP electronic patient record product."There is still more work to do to bring the group's performance up to the standards I expect, but the changes we have made in the last year provide the core foundations for the next stage of our growth," said Thorburn.EMIS Group's shares were down 2.24% at 915.00p at 0840 BST.