Filtronic sees return to profit; no immediate impact from Brexit

Electronics maker Filtronic said it had narrowed full year losses and was looking to a return to profitability.

Pre-tax losses were cut to £7m from £11m on sales revenue of £13.6m compared with turnover of £17.5m in 2015 as new orders arrived in the fourth quarter for Filtronic's new Integrated Antenna product line.

“The growth in both orders and further opportunities for our new products is very encouraging and forms the basis for our continued confidence that we are on the right strategic pathway toward delivering a return to profitable growth,” the company said.

“We remain, however, at the early post-launch stages for these new products and rely heavily on our end customer roll-out programmes performing to plan. Consequently, until these roll-out programmes are in full swing and the customer base has been further broadened, we expect to see some continued volatility in demand.”

Chairman Reg Gott said Filtronics did not anticipate any significant impact from Brexit “on our ability to design, manufacture and sell our products in Europe and the wider world”.

However, he said “we face considerable uncertainty as to the impact of Brexit and it would be remiss not to mention it”.

“We serve a global telecommunications and related sectors market working to global standards. The more immediate impact of Brexit relates to currency exchange movements and whilst this situation is still very fluid, and its impact difficult to accurately predict, it is reassuring that much of our business is transacted in US dollars (both buying and selling) thus providing us with a good degree of natural hedging,” Gott said.