Marketing translation software and services provider SDL plc (LON: SDL) hase seen its share price rally after it booked bumper profit, earnings and revenues during the first half.
For H1 2019, the Company achieved revenues of £182.5 million, up 28% on a year-on-year basis. This drove increases in operating profits to £11.9 million, up 53% on-year, and in profit before tax, which rose 40% on-year.
Owing to these sales fundamentals, shareholders enjoyed hikes in yields during the first half. Basic earnings per share rose 31% to 8.9p and adjusted diluted EPS jumped 14% to 12.3p.
SDL said that its recent acquisition, Donnelley Language Solutions, had performed well. It also noted that its premium services had grown to make up 40% of Language Service revenues, with revenues for the sector growing from £18.6 million to £52.0 million between H1 2018 and H1 2019.
SDL comments
Adolfo Hernandez, Company CEO , said,
“We are pleased to have delivered a good start to the year, which resulted in a 14% increase in adjusted diluted EPS over the prior year, benefiting from the acquisition of DLS and strong growth in key areas such as premium services and machine translation. During the first half, we continued to deliver on our transformation strategy, including the roll out of our automation programme, Helix, and completed the development of our next generation end-to-end translation platform, SDL Language Cloud, ahead of its launch in September. We enter the traditionally stronger second half with good sales momentum and a healthy sales pipeline. This, alongside the actions that we are taking on productivity, gives us confidence of delivering improved profitability for the full year, in line with management expectations.”
Investor notes
Following the update, the Company’s shares rallied 11.11% or 49.00p, to 490.00p a share. Peel Hunt reiterated their ‘Buy’ stance on SDL stock, having upgraded their stance at the start of August. Their p/e ratio was 17.85 and the dividend yield is 1.43%.
Elsewhere in the tech sector, there were updates from; Dialight Plc (LON: DIA), Seeing Machines (LON: SEE), Bidstack Group PLC (AIM: BIDS), Nektan PLC (LON: NKTN) and Keywords Studios PLC (LON: KWS).
