Capita rockets on swathe of new contracts
OUTSOURCING firm Capita yesterday pleased the market with a 14 per cent rise in full-year profit, boosted by a £5.5bn bid pipeline.
The FTSE 100-quoted company posted a 15 per cent rise in underlying revenue to £3.85bn and pre-tax profits of £475m in 2013. Shares rose over four per cent in the morning, before closing up 6.7 per cent.
Capita has already secured £588m in new contract wins this year to date, including a £145m deal with Transport for London to deliver congestion charging and traffic enforcement schemes.
The firm also said that it has signed an interim agreement with the Ministry of Justice to take on the existing electronic prisoner tagging contracts before the new one is implemented. The contracts were previously held by Capita’s peers G4S and Serco, who had to renege the deals due to fraud allegations.
“2013 was a year of strong sales, operational and financial performance,” said chief executive Paul Pindar, who announced in November that he would be stepping down today, to be replaced by his deputy Andy Parker.
“We accelerated our organic growth, sustained good cash generation and are reporting record underlying profits for the 25th successive year.”
The firm expects continued strong growth in 2014. “The UK market for customer and business process management remains very encouraging with major opportunities broadly spread across both our private and public sector markets, as evidenced by our current bid pipeline,” said Parker.