Personal Group (PGH) worked hard in 2018 to deliver its range of employee services, which include death and convalescence insurance, as well as salary sacrifice schemes, and now has more than 2m employees taking advantage of these benefits.
Progress was strong during the year, but would have been stronger still without the disruption created by the introduction of new general data protection regulations introduced in May. This resulted in some clients delaying their decision-making, while the core Hapi platform required the pre-loading of employee data, which made decision-making that much more complex.
Even so, the company’s Saas business, which offers software and processing facilities, saw revenue more than double, thanks to an increase in customer spend through the Hapi platform, which now has over 320,000 active users.
It also delivered a standalone version of the Sage Employee Benefits offer to Sage’s wider client base, taking its addressable market from 6m to over 27m when including its partnership with Sage, the UK’s largest software company.
The insurance group’s salary sacrifice scheme, Let’s Connect, pushed revenue ahead by a third as client numbers increased by 36 per cent. This represents a solid recovery in the wake of the government review of its salary sacrifice scheme, helped by a Royal Mail decision to offer the scheme to all its employees.
| PERSONAL GROUP (PGH) | ||||
| ORD PRICE: | 361p | MARKET VALUE: | £113m | |
| TOUCH: | 358-364p | 12-MONTH HIGH: | 573p | LOW: 334p |
| DIVIDEND YIELD: | 6.4% | PE RATIO: | 13 | |
| NET ASSET VALUE: | 113p** | NET CASH | £15.1m | |
| Year to 31 Dec | Gross premiums (£m) | Pre-tax profit (£m) | Earnings per share (p) | Dividend per share (p)* |
| 2014 | 24.2 | 9.2 | 25.1 | 19.6 |
| 2015 | 29.5 | 10.4 | 30.8 | 20.9 |
| 2016 | 31.4 | 10.5 | 29.7 | 22 |
| 2017 | 30.7 | 9.5 | 26.9 | 22.7 |
| 2018 | 31.4 | 10.2 | 27.2 | 23 |
| % change | +2 | +7 | +1 | +1 |
| Ex-div: | - | |||
| Payment: | - | |||
| *Dividends paid quarterly. First quarterly dividend of 5.825p for the year to Dec 2019 paid on 29 Mar | ||||
| **Including intangible assets of £11m, or 35p a share | ||||
