Sales growth reverses at Gresham

Gresham Computing, which provides software solutions to financial institutions, saw top-line disappear in the second quarter.

The picture over the six months period does not look too bad for the company. Profits for the six months ended June 30th increased 25% to £0.71m from £0.57m in the first half (H1) of 2011, on revenue of £6.02m, up 11% from £5.43m during the same period the previous year. Growth was driven by continued demand for Gresham's Real-Time Financial Solutions offering.

However, checking back to the first quarter figures reveals some less flattering comparisons for the second quarter trading period. Revenue in the second quarter appears to have been around £2.72m, down from £2.93m in the corresponding period of last year. Sales in the first quarter had been up 28% year-on-year.

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Second quarter adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) was up 7.3% to around £0.44m from £0.41m the year before. First quarter adjusted EBITDA had been up 25%.

Basic earnings per share at the half-year point increased 44% to 1.53p from 1.06p in the same period the previous year, while cash levels remained stable at £2.9m.

The company said its confirmed order book and pipeline of prospects are both strong, giving confidence for the future.

Chris Errington, Chief Executive Officer f Gresham, said: "We continue to deliver against our strategy and are making significant progress with Clareti Transaction Control (CTC). We are now well positioned in our pursuit of a number of strategic objectives.

"All other parts of the business delivered a creditable performance enabling us to grow both revenues and profits overall. We continued to make good progress with our Clareti Banking and Clareti Lending solutions, targeted at financial institutions in the Caribbean region, winning several new assignments and receiving excellent feedback on our relevance and delivery capabilities.

"We also made further progress with our existing deployment of Virtual Bank Accounts technology at Barclays, where customer numbers grew significantly in the period."

Gresham added that based on feedback from customers and successful proof of concepts, it expects to make significant progress with CTC, its flagship strategic technology platform, in the second half of 2012 and beyond.

As in the prior six months, no dividend for the period was paid.

The share price fell 1.95% to 63p by 10:50.

NR