Big contracts with oil companies in Africa, Norway, South America and Asia grew underlying pre-tax profit 18 per cent to £35.4m at marine engineer James Fisher (FSJ) last year. It would have been even more, but for the lumpy nature of defence work.
Fisher's offshore oil division struck a rich seam of business in the North Sea, driven largely by demand from Norway following new discoveries in mature fields which is where Fisher excels. An ongoing safety drive in the aftermath of BP's Gulf of Mexico spill also plays to the company's strengths and helped swell that unit's profit by a third to £17.2m. Sixty per cent of all sales now come from outside the UK - five years ago it was just 37 per cent - and that's only going to increase. Indeed, a big contract with BP in Angola had profits at the core specialist technical unit up 13 per cent to £22.4m. Fisher is targeting more of these. Supplying radioactive testing kit for the Olympics was a big one-off boost, too, but working through the backlog of nuclear decommissioning should fill the gap. Elsewhere, writing down the value of ships by £9.2m looks a sensible decision. Using the £21m it made selling its railway engineering business to buy Divex, a supplier of diving helmets and breathing apparatus to the oil and defence industries, is too.