It’s been nearly a six-month wait but recently reconfigured managed infrastructure provider, Redstone, has released its full year results for the year to end March 2013 - and what a busy year it has been. The firm has been following a significant evolutionary path to transform both its structure and its operational performance.
Group revenue declined 22% to £32m, which partly reflects the intentional move away from lower margin project work. Despite this drop, adjusted EBITDA declined only 4% to £2.4m. However, integration, demerger and reorganisation costs (including redundancy costs) contributed to an operating loss of £3m, versus a £33k profit in the previous year.
Discontinued operations - i.e. the demerged network based managed services business, Redcentric (see Redstone reconfigures ‘sum of the parts’) - saw revenue increase from £26m to £31m but operating losses deepen from £252k to £1.4m. Of course, the demerger follows the acquisition in September 2012 of Maxima (see Smith brings Maxima to the Redstone party), which provided critical mass for the managed services business that now forms part of Redcentric.
Needless to say, the past year has seen a fundamental re-organisation of Redstone, and will have occupied a significant amount of management time. However, the firm is now moving into its next phase with Chief Executive, Ian Smith, describing the business as being “lean and fit for purpose with a healthy pipeline of opportunities”. After a year of ‘getting the house in order’, it will be interesting to see how the remaining Redstone business (which is now focused on infrastructure, data centre and smart buildings solutions) performs.