Profits up as Severfield announces latest results

Underlying pre-tax profit at steelwork contractor Severfield rose 19% to £23.5M for the 12 months ending 31 March 2018, keeping the Group on track to deliver its strategic goal of having profits of £26M by 2020.

Revenue was up 5% to £274.2M compared to £262.2M in 2017, while underlying basic earnings per share were up 15% at 6.4p per share compared to 5.5p last year.

Severfield Chief Executive Alan Dunsmore (pictured) said that operating margin had benefitted from further developments to factory processes to drive efficiencies and reduce costs, as well as better risk and contract management processes

He added: “With a high quality and stable UK order book of £237m and a strong pipeline of opportunities which provides us with good visibility of earnings, together with an encouragingly improving outlook for our Indian joint venture, we remain confident that 2019 will be another year of progress for the Group.”

During the year, Sevefield continued to work on four large projects in London, each worth over £20M.

These consist of the new stadium for Tottenham Hotspur FC, the retractable roof for Wimbledon No. 1 Court, the City of London’s tallest office at tower 22 Bishopsgate and the Three Snowhill office development in Birmingham.

He added work was due to start on the London Google HQ project in the second half of next year. The order is worth more than £50M for over 15,000t of structural steelwork.

Mr Dunsmore said: “Despite the uncertainties of Brexit, we continue to see a stable UK market, with modest economic growth forecast, and a pipeline of potential future orders that remains good.

“This pipeline includes a number of significant projects in the coming months across the commercial offices, both in London and outside, retail, industrial and distribution, data centres and infrastructure sectors.

“The market for data centres and industrial and distribution appears strong at present and although pricing remains competitive, the projects in these sectors play to our strengths requiring high quality, rapid throughput, on time performance and full co-ordination between stakeholders.”