On the back of great results and a major acquisition for Pace Plc, it’s not too surprising that the other UK specialist IPTV set top builder Amino, is in just as good a shape, albeit a far smaller company.
Amino reported its first half figures with a 42% rise in revenues and a forward order book bigger than 6 months of its revenues. The company has never looked back after a rocky few quarters at the beginning of 2009 and had half year revenues of £18 million and an 18.5% rise in gross profit to £5.4 million. The order book is for 250,000 units and compares to the paltry 8,000 units it had on order a year ago, and given that the company has only ever shipped 3 million devices since in began life in 2002, this is quite a leap. This order book represents revenue of £21 million giving strong revenue visibility into H2 2010.
The company figures talked about Tier two contract wins in Eastern Europe and South America and improvements in the company’s logistics and supply chain management. Shipments in the half year were up 47% to 243,000 with MPEG-4 shipments up 325% compared to H1 2009, representing 79% of shipments in the period
Commenting on the results, Keith Todd, Non-Executive Chairman, said: ‘This has been an encouraging H1 performance, with record booked unit sales, that builds on the momentum from the second half of the previous year. Profitability has been impacted by foreign exchange movements, higher component prices and the adjustment of margins as the company scales into tier 1 and tier 2 markets, where important new contracts have been secured during the period.
The tier 1 contract he is talking about is widely understood to be with Telecom Italia for a hybrid IP DVB-T set top built around the Intel CE4100 Atom set top chip. It has also recently begun supplying Romtelecom in Romania with IPTV set tops.