22nd Jan 2015 10:12
LONDON (Alliance News) - NCC Group PLC Thursday expressed confidence for a "strong second half", as it posted a decline in pretax profit due to an exceptional gain in the previous year, and it saw good growth from its Assurance and Escrow divisions.
NCC proposed an interim dividend of 1.30 pence, up from 1.14 pence in the previous year.
In the half year to end-November, the company posted a pretax profit of GBP10.6 million, down from GBP11.1 million a year before, as revenue rose to GBP62.3 million from GBP54.0 million. In the previous year the company had posted a GBP1.9 million exceptional gain from the revision to estimates of a contingent consideration.
In NCC's Escrow division, revenue rose 4% due to strong performances in the UK and US. In Assurance, revenue rose 20%, despite the company's decision to drop a number of low-margin software testing contracts.
NCC Group withdrew from contention with Amazon.com Inc for the .secure top level domain last December, and is now focusing solely on its .trust domain. The company said it will use the proceeds from relinquishing .secure against its capitalised development costs incurred to date.
NCC is looking to form an online "gated community" with .trust, and it said Thursday its development of the technical capability and infrastructure to deliver this is on track and ahead of initial cost estimates. It said it is on track to launch this service at the end of the first quarter of calender 2015.
On Tuesday, NCC had said it acquired a group of European domain services business called Open Registry for GBP14.9 million, which it said will "significantly" enhance its Domain Services business. It expects this to help drive strong take up of .trust domains "in due course".
Shares in NCC are trading up 2.3% at 204.50 pence Thursday morning.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; [email protected]; @HanaSSAllNews
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