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Smiths Group PLC on Friday raised annual revenue guidance and interim payouts, after a strong half-year.
In the six months to January 31, the London-based engineering firm said revenue rose 26% year-on-year to £1.50 billion from £1.19 billion. This included around £127 million in favourable foreign exchange effects, Smiths noted.
On an organic basis, revenue rose 14%. This was in line with the ‘low double-digit percentage organic’ growth Smiths said it was expecting for the period in January.
The company said it saw ‘growth across all divisions, geographic regions, and major customer end markets’.
‘John Crane and Smiths Detection accelerated organic revenue growth as they scaled supply to convert strong orderbooks to revenue. Flex-Tek continued to deliver strong growth across all of its end markets. Smiths Interconnect’s growth continued, albeit at a more moderate pace than last year’s record levels,’ it explained.
Pretax profit rose 4.4% to £167 million from £160 million.
It raised its interim dividend payout by 4.9% to 12.9 pence from 12.3p.
Looking ahead, it raised annual guidance again. In the year to July 31, it now expects ‘at least’ 8% growth in organic revenue. This was higher that January’s guidance of at least 7%, which had been raised from November’s 4.0% to 4.5% range.
It kept the guidance of ‘moderate’ improvement in margin.
The upgraded guidance is supports by a strong order-book and trading trends, it said. It also noted its new product strategy is ‘working well’, with a strong pipeline and ‘recent launches ramping well’.
Revenue in the financial year that ended July 31 last year rose 6.8% to £2.57 billion from £2.41 billion.
Shares in the FTSE 100 firm opened up 1.6% to 1,742.50p each in London on Friday morning.
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