Chief executive Ian Buckley today revealed his disappointment at Tenon not achieving better full-year results, as the consolidator group announced a pre-tax profit before goodwill amortisation of £678,000 from a £55m turnover.
Talking to AccountancyAge.com, Buckley said merging 12 firms into his business during the year to 31 December 2001, had meant Tenon had spent a lot of time focusing internally.
But he added much of the business was now integrated, adding that the ‘back end’ of the business, including IT systems and management systems, would continue to be integrated this year.
The pre-tax figure announced on the AIM stock exchange, was in line with predictions of between £500,000 and £1m, although only a fraction of the original £6m stated prior to the group issuing a profits warning in December.
Buckley said he was ‘not interested’ in the profit figure after the effects of goodwill amortisation, which would reduce the pre-tax figure, but remained confident the group would bury its disappointment by making brokers targets of a pre-tax profit for 2002 of approximately £14.5m on a turnover of £100m.
‘We will not be looking to make acquisitions on the scale we made last year, although we may be interested in strengthening certain geographical and service line areas. Last year was a year of two halves, the second being unsatisfactory and it was disappointing not to get better results, but this was due to very specific reasons. We have it all to do in 2002 and it has started well.’
The group announced an historic annualised turnover of £80m. Goodwill acquired during the year amounted to £138m and the amortisation charge for the year amounted to £5.4m.