AGM Statement

RNS Number : 0904F

Filtronic PLC

25 October 2018

 

25 October 2018

Filtronic plc (the "Company")

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING STATEMENT

Filtronic plc (AIM: FTC), the designer and manufacturer of antennas, filters and mmWave products for the wireless telecoms and critical communications markets, is pleased to provide the following update ahead of its Annual General Meeting to be held later today.

Trading so far in the first half of FY2019 has been in line with our expectations. We were, in particular, pleased to announce both the first contract wins for our new Massive MIMO ("mMIMO") antennas and further incremental defence contracts during the period.

Our decision to combine our two businesses into one consolidated unit from the beginning of the year, with two specific sales organisations addressing the Wireless Telecommunications market and the Critical Communications market has been implemented and is working well.

We continue to progress our strategy of expanding our customer base and extending the markets we serve and, whilst it will take time for the benefits of this strategy to be fully realised, we are pleased with the growing number and quality of opportunities opening up to us across both market segments.

Our mMIMO programme is strategically significant and successful market acceptance of this product will be material in defining our near-term development. Overall market endorsement of the benefits of mMIMO is apparent and we believe this technology will be a key driver of 4G/LTE network densification over the next two years and become a cornerstone for the development of future 5G networks. We have devoted significant resources to ensuring that we maximise our opportunity with this product, but we caution that we remain dependent on a number of variables outside our control that will determine the rate of market take-up of mMIMO and hence the timing and rate of sales growth for this product.

In FY2016 we took the decision to gradually exit the OEM base station filter subset of the wireless telecommunications market as it had become, and continues to be, increasingly commoditised. Over the past two years we have benefitted from continuing sales of some of these legacy filter products, but we expect these sales to continue to diminish as these client programmes come to a natural end.

Whilst we continue to enjoy good baseload volumes from our long term defence contracts, the uncertainties regarding the timing of the market take-up for mMIMO and the rate of tail-off of our legacy filter sales make near term forecasting very difficult. However, we are confident that our position overall continues to strengthen and our outlook remains positive.

Enquiries:

Filtronic plc	Tel. [phone] or [e-mail]
Rob Smith (CEO)
Michael Tyerman (Finance Director)
Maura Moynihan (Company Secretary)
Panmure Gordon (UK) Limited	Tel. [phone]
Dominic Morley / Alina Vaskina (Corporate Finance)
Erik Anderson (Corporate Broking)
Walbrook PR Limited	Tel. [phone] or [e-mail]
Paul Cornelius	Mob. [phone]
Sam Allen	Mob. [phone]

Notes:

This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of Regulation (EU) No 596/2014.

 

END

 

 

AGMBUBDGLBDBGIS