IQ loses interim £0.3m
Article Date: Jul 01 2009Acquisitive financial market researcher IQ Holdings targets ‘strong profitability’ next year after a 15 per cent increase in first-half losses to £298,000.
Chief executive Julian Green says the AIM-quoted company, which more than doubled turnover to £980,000 in the six months to March, will put the emphasis on cost cutting to move into the black in the year to September 2010. Based in the City of London, IQ, which lost £440,000 in the year to last September and is expected by analysts to do much the same this year, faces an ‘unpredictable trading environment’, according to Green.
The company suffered £52,000 losses from one acquisition, The Wire, incurred in only a month after buying it from a division of AIM-quoted marketing communications concern Media Square. ‘We were going to turn it round,’ explains Green, ‘but we met resistance and it has ceased trading.’
At the same time, IQ bought Viewpoint Services from the same Media Square subsidiary in a £1.5 million partly deferred shares and cash deal. Viewpoint, which specialises in ‘qualitative recruitment market research’, is now the biggest part of the company, performing ‘robustly’ and seeking to add to its 500 clients, says Green.
He stresses that, while cost control and ‘battening down’ the takeovers made already are key priorities, ‘acquisitions remain a fundamental plank of our strategy’ and the board is on the lookout for more. Another acquisition, Rosslyn Research, which is absorbing the rump of The Wire’s business, faces ‘exciting prospects’ and is now profitable, ‘month by month’.
IQ Holdings’ revenues will be down in the second half of this financial year, following the recent departure from its IQ Research arm of director Jeanette Weir, who took some of its business with her. Floated at 2p in November 2007, the shares have fluctuated between 0.88p and 0.15p over the past year and now trade at 0.25p, valuing the company at £3.1 million.
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