New £10m Banking Facility

RNS Number : 9028M

Iomart Group PLC

02 June 2010

 



02 June 2010

Embargoed for 07:00

iOMART GROUP PLC

("iomart" or the "Group")

New £10m Banking Facility with Lloyds Banking Group

iomart Group plc (AIM:IOM), the managed hosting and cloud computing services company, today announces that it has agreed a £10 million credit facility with Lloyds Banking Group. This facility will assist iomart in its strategy to grow its managed hosting business through a combination of acquisitive and organic growth.

Angus MacSween, Chief Executive Officer of iomart Group plc, commented on the Group's growth strategy, "Having also today announced the Group's results for the year ended 31 March 2010, one can see that iomart is in a strong position from which to grow. The balance sheet is sufficiently strong to fund our business plans with the additional facility ensuring we are well placed to take advantage of acquisition opportunities as and when they arise.

The acquisition of RapidSwitch in May 2009, funded by the proceeds of the sale of a non-core business to BT in July 2008, has proven a success and immediately earnings enhancing. We therefore plan to execute on our strategy by acquiring further complimentary hosting businesses in order to drive both growth and profits."

Angus MacSween further commented on the agreement with Lloyds, "Lloyds Banking Group has proven to be extremely supportive of our business goals over the years, and we have developed a long-standing relationship with the bank.

"Lloyds has witnessed our maturing as an organisation, overseen our period of investment in our data centres and network, and, has seen us build a solid credible reputation for good service within our chosen markets. We are making strong inroads into the relatively new cloud computing space and we intend to capitalise fully on our proven capabilities and innovation in this fast growing and exciting market. Lloyds has been impressed by what we have achieved to date and through this new facility further demonstrate their confidence in iomart executing on its strategy to become the market leader in the UK."

Graham Silcock, Relationship Director in Glasgow & the West for Lloyds Banking Group's corporate markets division, added: "The provision of an acquisition facility on this scale demonstrates both iomart's appetite for growth and our commitment to supporting strong Scottish businesses with appropriate finance. The facility gives iomart the confidence to negotiate with target businesses knowing they have our full support. Only businesses with good balance sheets and strong management teams warrant pre-approved acquisition facilities and we feel iomart falls into that category."

For further information:

iomart Group plc	Tel. [phone]
Angus MacSween, Chief Executive
Richard Logan, Finance Director
KBC Peel Hunt	Tel. [phone]
Richard Kauffer
Daniel Harris
ICIS	Tel. [phone]
Tom Moriarty
Caroline Evans-Jones
Hilary Millar

About iomart Group plc

iomart Group is one of the UK's leading providers of managed hosting services. From a single server through to private cloud networks, iomart specialises in the delivery and management of mission-critical hosting services, enabling customers to reduce the costs, complexity and risks associated with maintaining their own web and online applications.

By physically owning and managing its own network infrastructure, including five state-of-the-art data centres in the UK, iomart offers world-beating levels of service to its customers. The Group offers a unique 100% uptime guarantee with all hosting services being engineered to ensure no single point of failure.

Services offered include: Managed Hosting, Colocation, Complex Hosting solutions, Content Delivery Networks, IP Transit, Data Centre Services and Cloud Computing (Infrastructure as a Service).

For further information about the Group, please visit www.iomart.com

 

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