The hospital market has been as badly affected by austerity measures as any other area of government spending, and the half-year results for sterile equipment specialist Synergy Health (SYR) again showed that pressure in the european health market has yet to ease. In the circumstances, underlying revenue growth of 9 per cent was better than could have been expected, with most of this generated by recent acquisitions in the US.
This helps explains why revenues in the Americas increased by 81 per cent at constant currency to £41.4m, with divisional operating profits nearly doubling to £4.7m. However, growth in the US was offset by problems in Costa Rica, where the withdrawal of a major customer impacted trading at its applied sterilisation technology plant.