Tribal Grp. Regulatory News (TRB)

Tribal Group plc

Interim Management Statement

Tribal, a leading provider of technology-enabled solutions to international education, learning and training management markets, provides the following update on trading, covering the period from 1 January 2014 to 15 May 2014.

Overview

Our Systems business continues to make good progress, and is seeing a good level of new opportunities both in the UK and internationally. Our Solutions business is performing as anticipated, with continued encouraging international opportunities offsetting a quiet domestic market. As a result of anticipated timing of some important contract closures and software installations, our profits in 2014 will show a greater weighting towards the second half of the year than in 2013. We remain confident of the outturn for the full year.

Our order book at 30 April 2014 remains good at £113m (31 December 2013: £127m), with the movement since the start of the year primarily reflecting the maturity of our Ofsted inspection contracts.

Net debt as at 30 April 2014 was £13.4m (31 December 2013: £4.6m), after taking account of payments relating to our recent acquisition of Sky Software, and deferred consideration payments relating to i-graduate. Our operating cashflow also reflects the timing of important contract milestones. Our expectations for net debt at the year end remain unchanged.

We are continuing to invest in the sustainable development of Tribal, with particular focus on management resources, software product development and sales capabilities. As we grow our international activities, we are making a number of important appointments to our leadership team. Most recently, we have appointed Jon Baldwin as Chief Higher Education Adviser. Jon will lead our Global Higher Education strategy development. Jon joins us from Murdoch University, Perth, one of Australia's leading research universities, where he was Deputy Vice Chancellor. Jon was previously Registrar at the University of Warwick and University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST).

Sector narrative

Higher Education

Our activities in Higher Education continue to show good momentum. In the UK, we have signed a significant extension to our contract with University of Kent, under which the university is deploying our student management system to support staff and students in all aspects of the student lifecycle and related administrative processes.

Also in the UK, our performance improvement work in Higher Education is evolving well. We are now increasingly involved in important projects with our existing customers such as Anglia Ruskin University and St Andrews University, where our teams are supporting change programmes through which these institutions are seeking enhanced operational efficiency through effective use of our technology.

Internationally, we have recently been appointed to supply our student management system to the University of South Africa (UNISA), which secures our market entry into South Africa. UNISA is the largest open and distance learning university in South Africa, and one of the largest distance learning institutions in the world with approximately 370,000 current students from across South Africa, Africa and other parts of the world.

Our pipeline in Higher Education remains strong, and we anticipate announcing further significant new customer wins as the year progresses.

Vocational Learning

Our activity levels in the UK vocational learning market continue to be steady. In Australia, our work supporting the New South Wales Student Administration and Learning Management (SALM) development programme remains on track, and deployment of the Technical and Further Education (TAFE) elements of our solution is scheduled for later in 2014.

Sky Software, which we acquired in March 2014, and which is based in Australia, is performing in line with our expectations. Sky's pipeline of new opportunities is developing strongly in a number of international markets, with particular focus on Australia and the wider Asia Pacific region. Most recently, Sky Software has secured a contract with Griffith University, Queensland, one of the top ten universities in Australia, to provide its Sky Campus hosted student management solution for the university's English Language Institute, operating across the university's various campus sites.

Schools / K-12

Our work in schools and children's services in the UK and internationally is in line with our expectations. In Australia, our support for the schools-focussed aspects of the SALM programme is expanding. Our system is being deployed in a staged manner across New South Wales' state schools, and we are now working with the Department of Education in New South Wales to further extend the functionality offered by our system over and above the capabilities first envisaged when the programme commenced.

Keith Evans, Chief Executive, commented "The early months of the year have seen continued encouraging progress. We remain confident of the medium and long term growth prospects for Tribal, which are underpinned by the continued growth and internationalisation of our customer base."

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 1,400 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.