North technology company Filtronic has hailed another profitable year in the face of global headwinds, after seeing its operating profit drop from £2m to £200,000.
The telecommunications specialist – with bases in Yeadon, Leeds, and at Sedgefield’s NETPark - saw revenues fall from £17.1m to £16.3m in the year ended May 31 2023, while pre-tax profit fell from £1.9m to £100,000 and the overall profit for the year was £500,000, down from £1.5m.
The company highlighted a number of contract wins during the year, including two new defence contract wins with the MoD; a series of recent contract wins worth over £2m across a diverse range of new telecommunication and private network customers; as well as its first contract win in the low earth orbit space sector, valued at £2.3m, to a market leader.
Read more: Find technology news from Business Live here
It said it had also further developed its opportunity pipeline after improving its sales channels, improving customer engagement, and strengthening its engineering team.
Chairman Jonathan Neale highlighted another year of profitable trading, despite the headwinds from the global semiconductor shortages, geopolitical uncertainty and a challenging economic environment.
He said: “The broad strategic goals of Filtronic remain the same. We seek value growth through provision of high-speed, low-latency, radio frequency electronics subsystem design and manufacture, for blue chip customers in growth markets.
“We are encouraged by the increase in market activity and the rate of requests for quotations in important complex products demanding world class capability. Strengthening our business development and engineering teams has been critical to be able to respond quickly. On several occasions this year we have proved ourselves capable to deliver world class engineering with innovative, complex solutions, demonstrating the kind of responsiveness to develop, and deliver at volume, high-quality mission critical products. Recent wins in the important and emerging low earth orbit space market, which is gathering pace, help us demonstrate our leading-edge technology and high-performance culture.”
Mr Neale said Filtronic remained committed to investing in research and development to be ready to meet the needs of emerging markets like the low earth orbit space sector, and that it wants to see greater scale in its business. However, he said there had been frustrations, including delays triggered at key providers in India.
He added: “There have been some frustrations, inevitably, as the post-Covid supply semiconductor issues unwind, but we continue to be paced by some end customer significant contract wins in key markets. Sovereign defence and communications technology demands are exciting but predicting contract timing remains an art not a science.
“The roll out of 5G telecommunication infrastructure technology remains important as the world continues to digitise, however, we note the recent market announcements from key providers in India indicating a somewhat stop-start deployment. These are features not faults in our markets and consequently these are the challenges we must meet. Agility and ambition remain tempered by an understanding of the need for a strong balance sheet and cash focus.”
