15th May 2015 07:31
LONDON (Alliance News) - Tribal Group PLC Friday said its expectations for 2015 are "broadly unchanged", with profit expected to be "strongly weighted" towards the second half of the year, but it has seen "certain customer procurement and programme timelines for software drawdown continuing to extend".
"Consistent with previous years, as a result of anticipated timetables for new contract completions and software installations, our profits in 2015 are expected to be strongly weighted towards the second half of the year," the education management software company said in a statement covering the first few months of 2015 up to May 14.
Tribal Group gave an update on higher education and said it has now been awarded a contract initially worth GBP3 million to deploy its SITS student management system for the University of Hull in England, after the company had previously seen a number of new customer contract awards move into 2015. The company said it has also secured its second customer in southern Africa, the Botswana International University of Science and Technology.
"Our pipeline of new university customers in the UK, Asia Pacific and North America continues to develop well. The integration of Callista, which we acquired in March 2015 and which makes Tribal the leading provider of student management systems in Australian universities, is proceeding to plan," Tribal Group said.
Turning to vocational learning, Tribal Group said there is stability in market conditions in further education in the UK.
"In Asia Pacific, our major systems programmes for the Technical and Further Education (TAFE) market in Australia are progressing well, and our pipeline of opportunities for Sky Software is encouraging. Our exploratory work in North America is gathering momentum," the company said.
Elsewhere, activity in UK schools is stable, according to the company, while work is ongoing on the New South Wales Student Administration and Learning Management (SALM) programme in Australia. Human Edge, which was acquired in June 2014, is trading in line with the company's expectations, Tribal said.
Net debt increased to GBP25.7 million on April 30 from GBP13.4 million at the same stage of the prior year, due to "deferred consideration payments relating to the purchase of Sky Software and seasonal working capital movements".
Tribal shares were down 5.3% at 142.34 pence on Friday.
By Samuel Agini; [email protected]; @samuelagini
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