De La Rue Issues Trading Update

De La Rue has issued a trading update in which it said that it expects its full year operating profits to be in line with market expectations (these being based on the average published notes from Investec and Numis Securities). Net debt is expected to be slightly better than market expectations of £75 million.

This follows the company’s last trading update on 24 January this year, in which it said significant headwinds since its interim results last autumn had become more pronounced, in particular the COVID variants leading to substantially increased employee absences, resulting in lower operational output for the year. In addition, it was contending with supply chain shortages and increased costs relating to these.

As a result of these external factors, DLR expects adjusted operating profit for the full year to be broadly similar to last financial year, in the £36-40 million range, versus original market expectations of approximately £45-47 million.

The company will be announcing its full year results on 25 May.

Climate leader for 2nd year

In a separate development, De La Rue has been recognised for the second year in a row by the Financial Times’ annual listing of Europe Climate Leaders.

The FT listing is compiled by research company Statista and includes the 400 companies that achieved the great reduction in their greenhouse gas emissions intensity between 2015 and 2020 (emissions intensity is defined as tonnes of emissions of CO2-equivalent per €1 million of revenue).

They only take account of so-called Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions — that is, respectively, those directly produced by a company itself, and those produced in generating the energy used by the company.

Scope 3 emissions, which occur at all other points in the value chain and which can account for the bulk of companies’ emissions – are not factored in, as there is no single standard for reporting them.

All European companies – defined as having headquarters in one of 33 European countries – with a minimum revenue of €40 million in 2019 were eligible for consideration.

Like last year, the UK is home to by the far the largest number of companies on the list, 120 this year (compared with 94 last year), followed by Germany with 52 and France with 44.

De La Rue came in at 40 on the list, with a 27.4% reduction in core emissions year-on-year from 2015-20 aligned with revenue growth (the highest score on the list was 46.8%, the lowest 3.3%).

In terms of total reduction in core GCH emissions over the same period, the figure was 83%, putting it – like last year – 17th on the list.