Photo-Me still clicking

Travellers buying passport photos during the peak holiday season helped Photo-Me (PHTM) deliver a solid first-half performance. Headline profits at the photo booth operator were also boosted by a £2.4m gain from selling a property in France.

Strip-out the property sale, however, and cash profits were largely flat year-on-year at £29.8m, while revenue slipped 2 per cent on a constant currency basis. Still, the sales and servicing business has returned to profitability after an extended period of restructuring and cost-cutting and lower capital spending helped the group's cash pile to rise by £18.2m. The number of global photo booth sites increased by 5.6 per cent to 24,300, too, with the expansion centred mainly on Germany. Turnover from each newer booth is around 50 per cent higher as the company wins market share from the country's traditional photography shops. The other growth area is coin-operated laundry machines, which it has spent the last three years developing. The roll-out plan calls for machines to be installed at 3,000 sites in France by end-2015. Management is coy about how much the programme will cost, but expects to fund the programme from existing cash resources.

Housebroker finncap increased its full-year forecasts by 9 per cent and expects adjusted pre-tax profit of £24m, giving adjusted EPS of 4.6p (2012: £20.1m/4p).

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