Just a couple of months after it issued interims showing that performance was nicely in line (Some positive early signs from NCC), escrow and assurance provider NCC Group has come back to the market with H1 prelims reporting unexpectedly early growth in its Assurance division business.
The company says greater understanding of information security issues and the need to counter and handle cyber-attacks has led to ‘significant’ revenue and margin growth within the Assurance Division. Although the growth was anticipated it has come through earlier than expected.
Security and risk mitigation can only become more important as ecosystems become wider and businesses open themselves up more e.g. through greater deployment of cloud services and mobile technologies. Risk and compliance management are also active areas for security specialist Symantec. The time has come and NCC’s positioning and acquisitions are starting to pay off. The information security units within Assurance, especially iSEC (acquired in 2011) and NGS (acquired in 2008) are doing particularly well. The growth in Assurance also helps balance the business as testing is normally NCC’s growth engine. Testing is performing in line with expectations.
The upshot is that current revenue levels are 27% ahead of H1 last year. Pre tax profit for the full year (to May 31 2012) is expected to come in at between £21m and £21.5m, ahead of market consensus of £19.6m. Although some of this improvement is attributable to acquisitions, there is also good organic growth.