| ICM releases financial results
Highlights include a slight increase in total revenue (£75.7m compared to £77.6m in the previous year) and a 17 percent increase in revenue for the company’s Business Continuity division. Profit before tax fell to £4.8m, compared to £5.1m in 2005, however ‘underlying profit before tax’ (before one off items of expenditure) rose by 6 percent to £5.4m (2005: £5.1m). Overview of business continuity related activities in the past year: ICM successfully acquired, refurbished and opened its largest business continuity centre to date in Romford, Essex. This investment was brought into operation to a very demanding timetable and ‘transforms the Group's entire business continuity offering with its scale and critical location’. The centre expands ICM's capacity in workplace recovery by over 33 percent and enables the Group to ‘service a new and much larger class of customer’. The initial three major contracts are all with substantial international financial institutions. The centre became profitable in July, only two months after opening. Though considerably smaller in scale, the opening of the Scotland Central business continuity centre in August 2005 in Hamilton, near Glasgow has ‘had a very positive impact on ICM's overall Scottish presence’. Revenue in ICM’s Business Continuity division grew by 17 percent to £16.4 million (2005: £14.0 million) and now represents 22 percent of Group revenues (2005: 18 percent). The contracted nature of the business means that future visibility of earnings is high and £9.5 million of revenue is already contracted for the first half of the current financial year. With the successful launches of the new centres in ICM believes that the business continuity marketplace will continue to move towards more complex managed services and show increasing demand for business continuity services, as part of the overall requirement for businesses to remain operational in all circumstances. Mike Osborne, managing director of Business Continuity at ICM, commented: ”The year has seen ICM achieve good sales growth in both organisations with long established BC plans and those new to the market. Our strategy of launching speculative regional recovery centres has proven to be exactly what organisations are seeking both at a local level and on a UK wide basis. In particular our sales growth has been driven by the outstanding quality of these centres and the transparency of the syndicated risks associated with them – a unique combination in the UK market. The year saw us commit some £14million to new facilities and we feel there are now just two regions left to complete our UK centre network. I look forward to sharing future developments with our clients and the market over the coming months”. http://www.icm-computer.co.uk/
•Date: 26th Sept 2006• Region: UK•Type: Article •Topic: BC markets |
