James Cropper eyeing reems of paper profits

James Cropper said it was confident of far surpassing the market's expectations as the specialist paper maker's sales trends from last year have continued in encouraging fashion.

Healthily rising revenues in 2015 that were strongest felt at the Technical Fibre Products (TFP) arm, which was not hit by the flooding from Storm Desmond that affected group headquarters in Cumbria, have continued in the final three months of the 53-week financial year to 2 April.

In the first half of the year TFP enjoyed strong demand across all sectors, with growth in aerospace, automotive and energy end markets and sales up 25%.

Desmond's effects are still "yet to be fully quantified" but directors are confident that "insurance and other mitigating factors will compensate for any adverse financial impact including business interruption".

As for the full year results, not only have recent currency movements been favourable, the company's underlying business is expected to "materially" exceed current estimates.

House broker Stockdale Securities has consequently upped its profit before tax forecast and nudged up PBT forecasts for the next two years.

All the uplift is driven by TFP where analysts said they were encouraged that the recent heavy capital investment is beginning to deliver a payback, leading to increased operating margin assumptions.

"While we have made no changes to our sales forecast for this division at £18.2m this implies a 25% increase in sales year-on-year. Because of a stronger divisional margin assumption this has led us to increase our group PBT forecast to £4.5m from £3.9m."