Gooch & Housego Regulatory News (GHH)

9 Oct 2008 07:00



Gooch & Housego PLC

(The "Company")

Full-Year Trading Update

Gooch & Housego PLC, the specialist manufacturer of optical components and systems, today announces that trading for the year to 30 September 2008 was in line with current market expectations.

In what has been a transformational year for Gooch & Housego, we have implemented many changes aimed at delivering sustainable long term growth. These include substantial investments in facilities, research & development, management and systems, plus our largest acquisition to date. 

As previously noted, challenging conditions in some of our key markets, most notably semiconductors and microelectronics, have had a short term impact on performance.  In contrast, we have achieved growth in other sectors such as biomedical, aerospace & defence and undersea telecommunications. Precision optics, electro-optics and crystal sales are all up year-on-year, while revenue growth in fibre optics has exceeded 40% during our first full year of operations. 

In terms of products and markets we have launched our first entirely new system-level products into the life sciences market, we have strengthened our position in the aerospace and defence markets via the acquisition of General Optics and we have a pipeline of important new products under development.

At the end of a year in which we have been building and investing for the future we are now well positioned to deliver our full potential to a global market.

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