25th Mar 2014 15:51
LONDON (Alliance News) - Quixant PLC Tuesday announced a maiden total dividend for 2013 as it saw pretax profit rise in its first year since listing on the AIM market, driven by new customer wins.
Quixant provides specialized technology platforms for gaming and slot machines.
The company proposed a maiden full-year dividend of 1.0 pence per share, and expressed its intention to maintain a progressive dividend policy.
Quixant posted a pretax profit of USD6.0 million, up from USD5.0 million in the previous year, as revenue rose to USD24.2 million from USD21.6 million, although this was partly offset by higher operating expenses. Quixant added new customers during the year, taking its total number of customers to 82, from 63, and reducing its reliance on its biggest customer.
The company's largest customer, Ainsworth Game Technology, accounted for 72% of the company's total revenues.
"Naturally the other customers coming online will reduce the percentage of the overall revenue Ainsworth represents. We're predicting that will move more towards the 50% type area in this year," Managing Director Nick Jarmany told Alliance News.
The company said that it had benefited from a heightened profile after listing on AIM in May 2013. It raised USD5.9 million from its initial public offering.
Quixant shipped around 21,800 boards during the year, up from 18,500 in 2012, but said that it thinks that this is less than a 5% share of the market. It estimated that there's been around 450,000 to 500,000 new replacement machines installed in the market in recent years.
"It's really to do with penetrating more large customers. We grew the company on the back of one Tier 2, Ainsworth, and you can get a feel for how valuable just a single Tier-2 is," Jarmany said.
2014 has started in line with expectations, Quixant said, as volume sales commenced with one of its new Tier 2 customers. Quixant said its current order book, as of the end of March, is over double that of the previous year.
Although the UK government last week announced plans to raise duty on gambling machines, this will not hit Quixant as it only effects a specific type of machine which Quixant is not currently involved with.
The terminals affected are known as B2 and B3 gaming machines, and include fruit machines and slot machines. On B2 gaming machines, a player can bet up to GBP2 per spin on slot games, while on B3 slot games, a player can bet up to GBP100 per spin every 20 seconds, although both types of machines are capped at a maximum prize per spin of GBP500.
"UK sales roughly represent about 4% of our whole business. Currently we don't supply into that market. For us it's a positive if anything, we're supplying the competitors," Jarmany explained. "One type of machine might go down, but another one will benefit on the back of that, we're trying to broadly supply all of the market so changes like that have very little effect on us."
Shares in Quixant were trading up 2.4% at 147.50 pence Tuesday afternoon.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; [email protected]; @HanaSSAllNews
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