IT firm’s 
profits up 
despite 
difficult 
market

The Sheffield-based company said turnover for the year to September 30 rose 3.6 per cent at £5.8m.

Michael Heller, chairman of EDP, said: “There are no signs of significant improvement in the markets we address due to continued uncertainty in the UK economy.

“Customers and prospects remain cautious when taking significant expenditure decisions. However, our product offering and financial strength means that we are well placed for the future.”

The group has recently accepted offers for two surplus properties which will generate £1.86m in cash.

“The offers we have accepted are lower than the previous carrying value in the accounts but we believe that it is in shareholders’ interests to dispose of these surplus properties now,” said Mr Heller.

The group has written-down the carrying value of these properties by £849,000 to £1.86m.

As a result of this write-down, EDP reported a statutory pre-tax loss for the period of £83,000.

Without this, the pre-tax profit for the year was £766,000 compared with £561,000 last year.

Year-end cash balances increased to £5.6m from £5.1m.

“We continue to look at opportunities to utilise these cash balances to acquire similar software producing businesses,” said Mr Heller.

The group will maintain the final dividend at 2.0p per share giving a total for the year of 2.713p.

EDP has two main product groups – software applications for distributors and merchants and Vecta, its market-leading sales intelligence product.

Traditionally it has licenced its products to be run on customers’ servers, but over recent years it has seen significant growth in the number of businesses hosting their applications with EDP through “the cloud”.

The hosting service is provided from EDP’s own secure facility. Hosting allows customers to relieve themselves of the burden of running and maintaining their computer systems on a day to day basis.