Idox Group Regulatory News (IDOX)

15 November 2011

IDOX plc

Trading year ends strongly, acquisitions performing well  

IDOX plc (AIM: IDOX, or the 'Group'), a leading independent supplier of software and services, has published a trading update for the year ended 31 October 2011.

The Group ended its trading year strongly and expects to report EBITDA and normalised pre-tax profit in line with market expectations and well ahead of the 2010 financial year.

The Group made two earnings-enhancing acquisitions during the financial year: McLaren Software and LalPac. Interactive Dialogues was acquired after the year end and the acquisition of CTSpace was also separately announced today. These acquisitions have strengthened the core business and have started to diversify the Group's activities into adjacent private sector markets, delivering for the first time significant international revenues. The acquisitions concluded during the financial year have performed well.

In the UK public sector software business, orders are 14% ahead of the previous financial year as a result of further gains in market share and growing orders for managed services, hosted solutions and strong adoption of the cloud consultee portal. The Group has concluded four contracts to deliver fully hosted managed services for Planning and Building control, including a "zero infrastructure" contract signed in October with Westminster City Council.

This increased shift to outsourced solutions has constrained top line revenue growth in the year but provides greater visibility through higher recurring revenues, exemplified by a ten-fold year on year growth in managed service new business orders, typically to be supplied over a period of five years.

In IDOX's recent entry into the engineering drawings document management market for highly regulated asset intensive industries around the world, McLaren Software has made an excellent maiden contribution, delivering strong organic revenue growth of 27% and a return to profitability during its first 10 months under ownership by the Group, following the delivery of a new version of its core product, changes in the marketing strategy and investment in sales resource in the second half of the year.

McLaren is now addressing a broader range of markets in respect of large capital projects, including strategic contracts with Arcelor Mittal and Chevron. It has started the new financial year with a strong pipeline of prospects.

The Information solutions business showed further growth and reduced rates of churn and its scale and capabilities have been expanded with the recent acquisition of Interactive Dialogues, concluded last week.

Recruitment revenues grew and delivered higher profitability during the financial year.

IDOX plc expects to announce its final results for the year to 31 October 2011 on Wednesday 14 December 2011.

Martin Brooks,Chairman, said:

 "Despite considerable economic uncertainty, we have delivered a strong financial performance for the year with the major highlights being a large uplift in managed services revenues in our UK public sector business and an impressive 27% maiden organic revenue growth in our new global engineering document management market business.

"This is the result of delivering innovative solutions to enable our public sector customers to provide more efficient and improved public services through the development of cloud based and hosted solutions.

"The clear link in our core competency of complex document management and related technologies across both our traditional public sector business and newer private sector engineering document management business is of considerable operational benefit. The strong organic growth demonstrated in the latter has given the board the confidence to accelerate the further development of this emerging market for the Idox Group. 

"The new financial year starts with a robust new product pipeline across the Group and we are positive about opportunities for revenue and profit growth going into 2012."

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About IDOX plc

IDOX plc is a supplier of software solutions and services to the UK public sector and increasingly to the wider corporate sector. It is the leading applications provider to local government for core functions relating to land, people and property, such as its market leading planning systems and election management software. Over 90% of UK local authorities are now customers.

The Group provides public sector organisations with tools to manage information and knowledge, documents and content, business processes and workflow as well as connecting directly with the citizen via the web.

These capabilities have been extended in 2010 via the acquisition of McLaren Software into the related area of engineering document management and control applications, serving many leading international companies in industries such as oil & gas, mining, utilities, pharmaceuticals and transportation.

IDOX also supplies decision support content and additional specialist services via the IDOX Information Solutions business, as well as transforming approaches to knowledge and content management via consultancy and training in the UK and internationally.

In addition, it provides these specialist skills to customers through its TFPL branded recruitment division.

For more information see www.idoxplc.com