A pre-close update from Quindell Portfolio shows revenue for the six months ended 30 June will be c£45m (Q1: c£12m, Q2: c£33m), and EBITDA profit will be c£14.8m (Q1: £5.5m, Q2: £9.3m). By comparison, Quindell made revenue of just £4m in H111, and EBITDA profit of £1.72m. The cash position also looks to have really benefitted from recent activity – this was up to £21m from £3.7m in December 2011. Investors were pleased, pushing up Quindell’s shares c7%.
It is difficult, if not impossible to really compare Quindell today from this time last year, since it has gone through a series of major acquisitions (see here and work back), to reinvent itself as a very new type of insurance-focused business process services (BPS) provider. It now offers a range of additional services to its core software and BPS activities, such as automotive claims (Ai Claims; completed in April), legal services (Silverbeck Rymer; completed in June) and medical reporting (Mobile Doctors; completed December 2011). And subscribers can read all of our views on this in the HotViews archive.
At this stage Quindell has given no indication of how the underlying business performed – i.e. we still wait to found out Quindell’s organic revenue and what is its true operating profit after all the nasty bits have been removed. But Quindell is clearly seeing plenty of interest and opportunity. It signed a £120m three-year contract in May (see Quindell wins £120m insurance BPS contract (update)), and said that its legal services, accident management and credit hire outsourcing businesses have ‘signed significant new business’ since being acquired. Apparently Quindell’s pipeline ‘of business under discussion’ now stands at over £500m. However it needs to also explain what qualifies for inclusion its pipeline to give this some perspective.
For us, one of the questions still hanging over the business is the acquisition of Silverbeck Rymer. Silverbeck is now part of Quindell and contributing to the revenue and profit. But the deal itself appears to be still waiting on approvals from the Solicitors Regulation Authority and FSA. We suspect Quindell’s other big prospects will also be waiting for these approvals before making their move.