Results round-up

First quarter results from ARM Holdings indicated the microchip processor maker remains at the forefront of technology and analysts forecasts, with licence revenue also bouncing back to growth after a slow finish to last year.

Revenues at the Cambridge-based company of $398m were up 14% year-on-year and 22% ahead in sterling terms, while profit margins moderated to 48.6% and earnings rose 15% to 8.2p, all better than the market's expectations.

Processor royalty revenues in dollars were 15% year-on-year, outperforming the industry by 18 percentage points, which was identified by some analysts as a key factor ahead of the results.

These strong gains, plus pre-tax profits expanding 14% to $137.5m all came in spite of normalised operating costs having increased by a third to £132.9m as a result of the step-up in investment plans to accelerate ARM's ability to grab market share in areas such as networking infrastructure and servers, and to create new products that will take advantage of opportunities in the Internet of Things.

Indicating the company's technology is being taken up by technology companies' newer products and likely to result in future royalties, dollar licence revenues increased 11% year-on-year to $148.3m, representing 37% of quarterly group revenues.

Royalty revenues were up 17% at $215.7m, representing 54% of group revenues, with sales of software and tools up 34% to $19.6m.

Clothing retailer N Brown posted solid final results and held its dividend steady but has endured a slowdown since the year end and warned of currency headwinds.

Sales in the new financial year have been lower than the previous year due to what is acknowledged as a challenging industry backdrop and the company's new marketing approach of shifting from large TV ad campaigns to a more steadily increasing investment in online and mobile as part of chief executive Angela Spindler's transformation of the business from being mail-order led to digital-first.

Management are confident the new approach to marketing delivers a better return on investment when viewed across the season as a whole, so expect to see performance strengthen over the first half.

From a non-trading perspective, the sterling-dollar exchange rate is predicted to result in a headwind of roughly £3m at the profit before tax (PBT) line.

"Looking forward, whilst we face challenging market conditions for the fashion sector overall, and trading since the year end has been subdued, we remain confident in our ability to make further progress this year," said Spindler, who said the company was midway through its turnaround.

This was indicated as benefits looked to be coming through in the second half of the year when there was 11% profit growth.

This enabled group to generate underlying PBT of £84.5m, a decline of just 2.0% on the previous year and in line with consensus City forecasts of £84.4m, on revenue that increased 3.5% to £866.2m in the 52 weeks to end Feburary.

Earnings per share fell 2.2% to 24.0p, reflecting a higher tax charge.

A final dividend of 8.56p is proposed, resulting in a flat year-on-year total of 14.23p as was expected.