25th Feb 2019 10:21
LONDON (Alliance News) - Lighting maker Dialight PLC said Monday its full year underlying profit fell after revenue dropped amid a "challenging" year, as it looks towards further growth in 2019 and beyond.
In 2018, pretax profit more than doubled to GBP7.4 million from GBP3.0 million the year prior. This was despite revenue falling 6.3% to GBP169.6 million from GBP181.0 million the year before.
Profit performance was helped by 2017 experiencing GBP6.4 million in one-off costs primarily associated with the transfer of lighting assembly production to its former manufacturing partner as well as asset impairments. In 2018, one-off costs only amounted to GBP400,000 due to pension charges.
Underlying pretax profit - excluding one-off costs - narrowed 17% to GBP7.8 million from GBP9.4 million the year before.
"2018 was a challenging year for Dialight but one in which we made considerable progress to address the operational issues we faced at the start of the year, reducing late orders significantly during the year," Dialight Chief Executive Marty Rapp said. "This improvement is primarily due to moving manufacturing under our hybrid model back in-house and terminating the relationship with our manufacturing partner. Further improvement in our operations remains a priority for us."
Dialight did not propose a dividend, in line with the year prior.
"With a strong focus on product development and expansion of the available market, we have laid the foundations to drive growth and restore market share," Rapp added. "We are planning to launch three major products in 2019 that will significantly expand the group's served market. We have two new facilities, in Mexico and Malaysia, to provide us with sufficient capacity to meet our growth aspirations."
"We remain excited by the group's prospects over the medium to long term and are confident of delivering future growth", Rapp continued. "The board's expectations of further progress in 2019 remain unchanged, again with a second half weighting."
Shares in Dialight were 7.8% higher at 366.36 pence on Monday.
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