Medical devices maker Clearstream reports rise in first-half losses
The company, listed on the London’s stock market’s junior exchange AIM, made a pre-tax loss of €1.4 million in the six months to end January 2008, up from €1.2m in the previous year.
ClearStream, which makes stents and catheters, used to clear clogged arteries, said the increased losses was the result of a reduction programme involving both voluntary and enforced redundancies, which set the company back €142,000.
This saw 28 people leave the company last November and December.
Revenues for the half year fell to €3.5m from €4.7m a year earlier as sales of co-labelled products fell.
“The substantial decline in co-labelling sales during the period was disappointing and was due entirely to difficulties experienced by one major customer,” the company said yesterday, adding that some improvement can be anticipated in the second half to the year with the launch of new products.
Sales of its own brand products rose to €2.3m from €1.4m.
Brokers at Goodbody said that stripping out the redundancy costs, the company made a loss per share of 4.9 cents, which was better than it had forecast.
Revenues were also higher than anticipated. The company added that the first half results for the period “confirm that the group is making solid progress towards achieving positive net margins.”
ClearStream said that the order intake for the second half of its financial year, should see a significant improvement in trading.
“Based on current order intake and trading patterns, they believe the outlook for ClearStream brand sales is very positive. Historically second half sales have been stronger than first half and the group has seen for four successive years second half-year on second half-year sales growth in own brand product sales.”
Shares in ClearStream closed down nearly 4% last night.
