As regular readers will know I have been in NCC for many years and have been a generally happy holder. I have had a few queries over some of the accounting policies and have never been a fan of domain services which has always in my valuation been accorded nil value.
I will probably at some stage do a fuller review but until then these are the highlights for me.
Revenue up 56% to £209.1m, with organic growth of 19%
Assurance division margin down to 15% from 18%. Management see 20% as an achievable medium term objective.
Escrow margins down to 57% from 59%
Adjusted fully diluted earnings per share up 19% to 11.2p
Share based payments up 20% to £1,191m
Dividend up 17% to 4.65p
Revenue renewal rates in both Assurance and Escrow at 90% providing a very solid base.
Good growth in Escrow in UK, Europe and US. (Regular readers may remember that I see escrow as the goose that lays the golden eggs for NCC).
No customer over 4% of revenue.
Fox-IT. Clearly the suggestion in the results is that the existing customers have been largely retained after the acquisition, but that the services provided have not yet been rolled out to the full NCC customer base. so strong potential there.
Closure of the domain services division. Exceptional charge of £13.7m of which only £0.9m is new cash. Given I have always regarded this as worthless I think the redeployment of some staff and a better focus from management is a big plus.
If you have read my earlier items on NCC I think the adjusted figures are open to debate. But a very quick reconciliation (and NCC does make this reasonably easy suggests to me that real ongoing profitability is up over 40%. This was done very quickly so DYOR).
Altogether an impressive set of results and an indication that more can be expected going forward.