LONDON (Alliance News) - Market research company YouGov PLC on Monday said its current financial year has started well, with trading in line with expectations, as it reported a rise in pretax profit for its most recently ended financial year.
YouGov proposed a final dividend of 1.0 pence for the year, up 25% from 0.8p a year before.
For the half year to end-July, the company reported a pretax profit of GBP2.7 million, up from GBP733,000 a year before, on revenue of GBP76.1 million, up from GBP67.4 million.
In the US, YouGov's largest operation in revenue terms, revenue rose 18%. Its new Asia Pacific and French businesses grew strongly, it said, and in the UK the company saw revenue growth of 18%.
The company noted that, whilst political polling is only a small part of its business, it is "high profile" and "rightly gets a lot of attention particularly when the polls prove to be out of line with the election results, as they were in the 2015 General Election in the UK".
YouGov, amongst other pollsters, came under fire following the outcome of the Election as its polls indicated that the Conservatives and Labour were neck-and-neck in the run up to the election, however in the end the Conservatives secured an outright majority.
"This was a reminder to the entire industry that we must treat each result as an opportunity to learn and to adapt our methodology, and we will be making a full report on this at our annual YouGov-Cambridge conference in November," YouGov said in a statement.
"We are well positioned to deliver the medium term goals that we set out to shareholders last year and see significant opportunities for further growth of our existing data products and services, BrandIndex and Omnibus, as well as high potential for the YouGov Cube and YouGov Profiles. This is an exciting time for YouGov and the current financial year has started well with trading in line with expectations," said Chief Executive Stephan Shakespeare in a statement.
Shares in YouGov were up 2.2% at 118.00 pence Monday morning.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; hanassmith@alliancenews.com; @HanaSSAllNews
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YouGov (YOU)