Tribal Grp. Regulatory News (TRB)

Tribal Group plc

Trading update

Tribal, a leading provider of software and services for education management, provides the following update on trading, covering the period from 1 January 2015 to 14 May 2015.

Trading

Whilst trading for the period has seen certain customer procurement and programme timelines for software drawdown continuing to extend, our outlook for 2015 remains broadly unchanged. 

Higher education

As previously highlighted, towards the end of 2014 we saw the timing of a number of new customer contract awards move into 2015. We have now been awarded a contract with an initial value of £3m to deploy our SITS student management system for the University of Hull. We have also now secured our second customer in southern Africa, the Botswana International University of Science and Technology.

Our pipeline of new university customers in the UK, Asia Pacific and North America continues to develop well. The integration of Callista, which we acquired in March 2015 and which makes Tribal the leading provider of student management systems in Australian universities, is proceeding to plan.

Vocational learning

Market conditions in further education in the UK are stable. In Asia Pacific, our major systems programmes for the Technical and Further Education (TAFE) market in Australia are progressing well, and our pipeline of opportunities for Sky Software is encouraging. Our exploratory work in North America is gathering momentum.

Schools / K-12

Activity levels in the UK schools market are stable. In Australia, our work on the large New South Wales Student Administration and Learning Management (SALM) programme continues, and Human Edge, which we acquired in June 2014, is trading in line with our expectations.

Financial position

Net debt at 30 April 2015 was £25.7m (30 April 2014: £13.4m), reflecting deferred consideration payments relating to the purchase of Sky Software and seasonal working capital movements.

Outlook

Our expectations for 2015 remain broadly unchanged. Consistent with previous years, as a result of anticipated timetables for new contract completions and software installations, our profits in 2015 are expected to be strongly weighted towards the second half of the year.

End

Editors' note:

Tribal is a leading provider of technology-enabled solutions to the education management market. We build world-leading education management software, and provide performance improvement and quality assurance solutions across universities, colleges and schools, in the UK and internationally.

We work in partnership with a wide range of organisations, including schools, colleges and universities, government agencies and large and small employers.

Tribal has around 1,500 staff and our work spans five continents across the world. More information about Tribal is available online at www.tribalgroup.com. 

This Statement has been prepared for and is addressed only to our shareholders as a whole and should not be relied on by any other party or for any other purpose. Tribal, its directors, employees, agents or advisers do not accept or assume responsibility to any other person to whom this Statement is shown or into whose hands it may come and any such responsibility or liability is expressly disclaimed. This Statement may contain forward-looking statements and the financial information is unaudited. Any forward-looking statement has been made by the directors in good faith based on the information available to them up to the time of approval of this Statement and should be treated with caution due to the inherent uncertainties, including both economic and business risk factors, underlying such forward-looking information. To the extent that this Statement contains any statement dealing with any time after the date of its preparation, such statement is merely predictive and speculative as it relates to events and circumstances which are yet to occur and therefore the facts stated and views expressed may change. Tribal undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements.