Directors at North East technology firm Kromek have hailed a milestone year in which growing contract volumes contributed to a 23% boost in turnover.
The Sedgefield business, which designs and manufactures high-tech pieces of kit for the nuclear detection, medical and security markets, said new contract wins and repeat orders from existing customers helped to boost turnover to £14.5m.
Adjusted Ebitda grew fourfold to £2m and the pre-tax loss for the year narrowed by 48% to £1.3m, while the operating loss more than halved from £2.3m to £906,000.
The group also successfully delivered its largest second half of revenue in its history, of £11m.
The growth has been achieved against a backdrop of a significant factory move of its US plant, to a new site in Pennsylvania and further expansion is now being carried out.
Kromek secured £21m of finance from investors in January, £10m of which is being split between the two sites.
Chief finance officer Derek Bulmer said recruitment was already under way at Sedgefield, where engineers and technicians are being hired alongside sales and marketing staff for a growing commercial team, to sell its growing suite of products.
The County Durham workforce is expected to grow from 60 to 80 in the next 12 to 18 months.
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Dr Basu added: “At the moment there’s a significant expansion programme at Sedgefield and in the US, which is one of the reasons we raised equity this year, and that’s underpinned by the contract wins.
“Part of that £21m was to do a significant expansion of our capacity for CZT (Cadmium Zinc Telluride) production, for delivering contracts and having the confidence to take on new contracts.
“We are quadrupling our capacity in terms of furnaces and high throughout producing post-processing lines.
“Sedgefield will be full to the brim when it is completed and we are taking on people and a huge amount of investment is going into that. It’s a hive of activity at the moment.
“In September all will be up and running, and will be absoloutely a state-of-the art CZT manufacturing facility that the group will have.”
Kromek made significant commercial progress in the medical imaging markets during the year, delivering on previously-won orders, receiving repeat orders from existing customers as well as securing new contracts with new customers across its key segments of SPECT, bone mineral densitometry (“BMD”) and gamma probes.
During the year, Kromek continued to increase sales of its D3S products, which include its handheld radiation detector, and as a result the family of products is now sold in 18 countries worldwide. The D3S platform was used in active deployments and field-tests in US, Asia and Europe, and this is expected to lead to sales in the future.
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In security screening Kromek was awarded a two-year $1.5m contract by the US Department of Homeland Security to develop CZT detector modules for detectors for advanced X-ray systems for passenger baggage screening, and it also won a new five-year $7.8m contract from an existing customer to provide customised detector modules for incorporation in baggage screening products.
Looking ahead, expansion is now taking place at the group’s two bases to capitalise on opportunities now and in the future.
Chief executive and founder Arnab Basu said: “This has been a pretty solid year for us. We talk about milestones but it really was for us.
“We had year-on-year growth in revenue, our Ebitda quadrupled and we have halved our losses, and we announced an $80m new deal which give us 80% visibility for this year’s revenue – everything is pointing in the right direction.”