CentralNic Group PLC (LON:CNIC), the internet platform company, expects full-year revenue to be well ahead of market resources after a strong second quarter.
The company said in a first-half trading update that the April-June quarter saw revenues rise by 63% from a year earlier to US$90mln, with like-for-like growth of around 25% - a record level for the group.
Revenue for the first six months of 2021 should be around US$174mln and adjusted underlying earnings (EBITDA) should be around US$20mln, with the group seeing growth across all of its revenue lines.
This represents a 56% and 32% increase respectively over the US$111.3mln and US$15.1mln results for the same period last year.
Cash increased to US$39.5mln from US$28.7mln at the end of 2020, while net debt shrank to US$84mln from US$85mln six months earlier, notwithstanding the deployment during the half-year period of a total of roughly US$13mln on the acquisitions of Safebrands and Wando and the final deferred consideration payment for Team Internet.
Adjusted operating cash conversion was again well in excess of 100%, CentralNic noted.
"CentralNic has enjoyed a very strong second quarter across both our digital subscriptions products and our privacy enabled online marketing technologies – achieving record organic growth of 25%, following 16% organic growth for the first quarter 2021 and 9% for the full year 2020,” said Ben Crawford, the chief executive officer of CentralNic.
“The company expects to deliver revenue for the year well ahead of market expectations through our significant investment in resources, restructuring and new business, resulting in profits we expect to be comfortably in line with market expectations. As our investment levels plateau, we expect future periods to benefit from increasing operational leverage," he added.