Zytronic unveils record profits and sales
Dec 9 2010 by John Hill, The Journal
TECHNOLOGY company Zytronic has unveiled record profits and sales. The company saw turnover for the year to the end of September rise from £15.9m to £18.5m, with pre-tax profit rising from £2.3m to £2.9m – above brokers’ forecasts of £2.6m.
Earnings per share hit 14.9p from 11.6p, while the full-year dividend was up from 5p to 7p. The company also announced an increase in orders received in 2010 to £19.8m, a rise of 23% from the £16.1m in 2009.
Chief executive Mark Cambridge said: “We’re pretty pleased with our performance for the year. We’ve seen significant improvements above market expectations.
“It’s a record year for Zytronic, not only from a turnover perspective but also in areas such as profit and proposed dividend. We’re very confident for the future.”
The Blaydon company said it is confident of further growth on the back of interest in its touchscreen products, but that this year’s success was also driven by orders for components for traditional ATM machines. Zytronic has contracts with leading ATM manufacturers such as NCR and ATM optical filter unit sales were up 36%.
Cambridge said: “The ATM sector has progressed quite well for us during 2010. It’s been a better performing market this year. From our understanding, banks are increasingly wanting to put ATMs in.”
The company employs 195 people in its Blaydon factories, but total export sales accounted for 90% of its turnover. In this period, exports of its touch sensors reached 93%, up from 88% in 2009. However, it does offer products to UK niche markets such as interactive video jukeboxes.
Cambridge said: “The issue is where products are designed and where they’re built. From a design perspective we’re likely to see more opportunities coming out of North America, but in terms of where we ship components for them to be put into a product, we’re seeing that in the Far East. For us, it’s pretty plain that if we were just relying on the UK marketplace we wouldn’t be a company. It’s a global product.”
Gaming volume decreased by half during the year as projects begun in 2009 were hit by the recession, but Zytronic is confident the new contracts it has acquired will help it to rebound.
Cambridge said: “A lot of the people who picked up products were early adopters and we had a very good sales year in 2009. We felt some recessionary effect in 2009 though not in the gaming sector, but in 2010 it hit.”
Total sales of touch sensor units rose 11% in the year, with a rise in self-service and vending including Blockbuster Express DVD vending kiosks and sales of production units of Coca Cola Freestyle drinks dispensers.
Zytronic said the thrust of its development and sales work was going into its touchscreen products, which are directed towards industry.
Finance director Denis Mullan said: “Increasingly it’s going to have applications in things like self-service and vending as well as digital signage.”
