Pre 8 a.m. comments

So far, it's a very quiet morning for results. I shall be looking at Bond International Software (LON:BDI) results for the year ended 31 Dec 2012. I held shares in this company a few years ago, but sold out after poor performance. Profits have fallen every year in the last four, indeed it was loss-making in 2010 and 2011. I also didn't like their aggressive accounting treatment of capitalising development spend, then presenting profit figures excluding amortisation, which seemed to totally ignore development costs - hardly reasonable.

Bond is a software company in the payroll and HR area, operating internationally, with it's biggest markets being the UK and USA.

At 45.5p per share, and with 36.6m shares in issue, the market cap is £16.7m.

I like the presentation of the P&L, where profit is clearly shown both before and after amortisation of development spending, at £5.4m, and £2.8m respectively. Then a third profit figure after amortisation of goodwill from acquisitions is also shown at £1.2m, then exceptionals of £475k take us to an operating profit of £676k, then we fall again to a profit before tax of £558k, and there is an income tax credit (probably due to R&D tax credits I would assume) of £393k taking earnings to £951k for the year.

So really there's something for everyone in there - take your pick from six different profit options, where the largest is almost ten times the smallest! To my mind, the profit measure which best shows underlying performance is the £2.8m operating profit after amortisation of development spending, but before amortisation of goodwill. That is up 7% against last year, on turnover down 3%, so a reasonably sound performance in my opinion.

EPS on the same basis is 6.19p, putting them on an adjusted PER of 7.4, which looks good value to me. It looks like a significant beat against expectations of 3.4p EPS, although I can't tell what basis the forecast is calculated on. Although most brokers usually quote adjusted EPS as the key forecast figure.

The crucial outlook statement reads well, with the key sentence saying;

 

"all three divisions have had a strong first quarter, delivering profit ahad of the same period last year".

 

 Notably, the final dividend has been…

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