Over the half year to September, the value of Mercia Technologies’ (MERC) direct investment portfolio rose by 17.7 per cent to £77.8m. This stemmed partly from the group’s decision to plough £11.2m into 11 companies, and partly from a £2.6m rise in net fair value gains. Indeed, four portfolio constituents enjoyed uplifts – Faradion, Intechnica, Voxpopme and The Native Antigen Company. These performances were tempered by Aim-traded Concepta (CPT), whose share price fell despite a successful placing and “continuing commercial progress”.
Elsewhere in the portfolio, three entities achieved their largest-ever multimillion-pound contract wins to date. Oxford Genetics won its respective deal with a global ecommerce provider of reagents to the research and clinical community; Aston EyeTech with a fast-growing optical retailer; and nDreams with a high-profile global tech organisation. nDreams provides creative content for the virtual reality entertainment market – a sector that PwC reckons will be worth £1.2bn by 2022.
Meanwhile, Mercia saw a further reduction in its net expenses – denoting total revenue minus all staff and administrative expenses – from £0.9m to £0.7m. It will continue with such work to minimise the erosion of net asset value (NAV) arising from its operations.
House broker Canaccord Genuity expects pre-tax profits of £1m and EPS of 0.33p for the year to March 2019, (from losses of £1.2m and EPS of 0.55p in FY2018).
| MERCIA TECHNOLOGIES (MERC) | ||||
| ORD PRICE: | 30.5p | MARKET VALUE: | £92.5m | |
| TOUCH: | 30-31p | 12-MONTH HIGH: | 45p | LOW: 28p |
| DIVIDEND YIELD: | nil | PE RATIO: | 43 | |
| NET ASSET VALUE: | 41p | NET CASH: | £28.9m | |
| Half-year to 30 Sep | Turnover (£m) | Pre-tax profit (£m) | Earnings per share (p) | Dividend per share (p) |
| 2017 | 4.8 | 1.4 | 0.5 | nil |
| 2018 | 5.3 | 1.9 | 0.6 | nil |
| % change | +9 | +36 | +33 | - |
| Ex-div: | na | |||
| Payment: | na | |||
