Robinson maintains revenue

Revenue from overseas operations increased by 82% to £6 million and now account for 23% of the group's total. Robinson said this was a result of customers’ continued migration of business to Central Europe to the benefit of the Group's facility in Lodz, Poland. As a result of this migration, the company’s UK operations revenues reduced by 11% in 2008. Overall though, revenues benefited from favourable exchange rate movements and increased raw material costs which were successfully passed on to customers. In 2008 the underlying volumes fell by approximately 4% on 2007, mainly due to the annualised impact of two contracts lost in the latter part of 2007. However, Robinson said the contracts were at low margins and following the actions taken to reduce capacity and reduce cost in 2007, the company fully expected the full year result for 2008 to show a further improvement in profitability over the previous year, with a continuation of the recent reductions in input prices helping to further improve profits going forward. The year was starting with evidence of growth in both sales and margins, but at this early stage much depended on how the consumer goods markets develop during the year.