30th Apr 2015 07:42
LONDON (Alliance News) - Saga PLC Thursday reported higher like-for-like profit for its last financial year as revenue rose thanks to strong demand for its travel products and margins improved, although it swung to a pretax loss due to losses from an operation it has earmarked for sale.
The provider of travel and financial products tailored to the over-50s reported a pretax loss of GBP133.8 million for the 12 months to end-January, compared with a profit of GBP106.6 million a year earlier, as it booked a GBP220.2 million loss from the public parts of Allied Healthcare that it has earmarked for sale.
Excluding that, its pretax profit from continuing operations fell to GBP113.8 million, from GBP167.9 million, due to GBP50.0 million of costs for last year's initial public offering as well as GBP34.6 million of interest on debt on borrowings.
Stripping out those items too, its like-for-like profit rose to GBP195.5 million, from GBP178.3 million, as revenue rose to GBP900.5 million from GBP895.4 million, and its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation margin improved to 21.3% from 20.7%.
It also beat its debt reduction target with its net debt to Ebitda ratio declining to 2.5 times at the end of January, from 3.1 times a year earlier.
It proposed a maiden final dividend of 4.1 pence a share, at the top end of the range it had set out at its IPO. It said it has now increased the top end of its target dividend range to 60% of net income.
Chief Executive Lance Batchelor said the current year has started well and trading is in line with the company's hopes. It is targeting an increase of between 5% and 7% on its trading Ebitda figure of GBP227.4 million in the current year, after achieving 6.0% growth in the last year.
Saga shares were up 0.6% at 189.77 pence Thursday morning.
By Steve McGrath; [email protected]; @stevemcgrath1
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