Keller Group plc (“Keller” or “the Group”), the international ground engineering specialist, today announces a trading update for its current financial year to date.Welcome to EditPad.org - your online plain text editor. Enter or paste your text here. To download and save it, click on the button below.
Trading since the half year has been extremely good, culminating in an outstanding performance in October. This reflects a continuation of the strong growth in both sales and margins seen in the first half of the year.
Order intake has kept pace with sales and, as a result of the acquisitions of Piling Contractors (August) and Anderson (October), the Group order book has increased by around 15% since the end of June.
This strong performance is due to consistently high levels of activity and good profitability across all our geographic segments. In the US, our foundations businesses have continued to perform exceptionally well, with strong demand in their commercial and public infrastructure markets. As expected, Suncoast’s sales are suffering because of the slowdown in the residential market, but it has nonetheless reported excellent results for the year to date.
Elsewhere, the Group is taking full advantage of strong market conditions in most European markets, Australia and the Middle East and is benefiting from strengthening demand in Germany.
It is still too early to predict the impact of seasonal factors in November and December. Nonetheless, given the strength of trading in the year to date, the Board believes that Keller’s results for the year ending 31 December 2006 will be significantly above current market expectations.
Justin Atkinson, Chief Executive, commenting, said:
“We are currently enjoying good demand for our ground engineering solutions in most parts of the Group and our strong sales growth continues to outstrip market growth rates.
“Whilst we remain cautious about the sustainability of the extremely buoyant trading in the US, we are confident of delivering further improvement in our other geographic segments.”