Hampson announces record growth

Commenting on the year, chairman Chris Geoghegan, said: "Over the last five years, Hampson has been executing a clearly focussed strategy to build a stronger, better diversified group, with attractive positions in certain long term growth sectors within the global aerospace industry. It is therefore pleasing for me to report that at a time when the global economy has experienced profound weakness, the strategy we have been pursuing has yielded another year of record growth in revenue and trading profit. We anticipate a challenging year ahead for all our businesses but are confident that we are well-placed to weather the shorter term headwinds and to continue to grow as soon as market conditions permit." Geoghegan said that from relatively diverse engineering origins, Hampson had now been transformed through a series of six high quality US-based acquisitions over the last four years into an international aerospace group of substantial scale and technical capability. It now had operations spanning three continents, many of which were playing a critical on-going role in some of the world's most important and prestigious commercial and military aerospace programmes. The aerospace composites & transparencies division - the growth engine of the group - was responsible for 59% of revenue in 2008/09, up from 29% in the previous year. "We anticipate this percentage will continue to rise going forward and this sector will continue to represent the focus of our investment," Geoghegan said. Strong contributions from acquisitions Odyssey and GTS had exceeded pre-acquisition expectations, helping to achieve the year's 62% revenue growth. Both had been successfully integrated and with an additional 150,000 square feet of capacity now available, Hampson was now looking forward with confidence to the value its combined tooling businesses will deliver over the longer term as new generations of composite-rich aircraft are developed. For the year to 31 March the group reported revenue up 62% to £256.6 million (£157.9m) while trading profit rose from £22.4 million to £47.4 million although the groups statutory results were impaired by the bankruptcy of Eclipse Aviation Corporation, lower activity levels in the automotive business and the strength of the US dollar.