Interim Management Statement

RNS Number : 0024X

Tribal Group PLC

14 November 2014

 

14 November 2014

Tribal Group plc

Interim Management Statement

Tribal Group plc ("Tribal"), a leading provider of systems and solutions to the education, learning and training markets in the UK and internationally, provides the following update on trading, covering the period from 30 June 2014.

Overview

Our Systems business continues to make good progress, particularly in our international markets.  We are currently in advanced negotiations on a number of significant international software contracts.  We anticipate that the majority of these contract negotiations will complete before 31 December 2014.

The re-positioning of our Solutions business towards greater emphasis on technology-based revenues is proceeding.  We have now largely withdrawn from our work in careers advice and guidance, and are focusing on development of our performance improvement solutions, especially our analytics and transformation offerings.  Our quality assurance activities in the UK and internationally are performing as anticipated. 

Based on our expectation of contract completions and the achievement of key contract milestones before the end of the year, Tribal's trading remains in line with our expectations for the full year. 

We continue to generate good operating cashflow, and our net debt at 31 October 2014 was £11.8m (30 June 2014: £14.5m).

Higher Education

Our international activities in Higher Education are continuing to develop well.  Our pipeline of new customer contracts is robust, with strong prospects in the UK as well as across our growing international activities in Asia Pacific, North America and South Africa.

Vocational Learning

Our student management systems activities in Asia Pacific continue to develop strongly.  In the UK, the Further Education college market has been relatively quiet, although the work-based learning market remains active.

In Asia Pacific, our work on the Student Administration and Learning Management ("SALM") programme with the Department of Education in New South Wales has successfully completed a major milestone.  At the end of October, our student management system went live simultaneously in all 138 TAFE college campuses across New South Wales, building on the initial deployment of our system in 229 schools earlier in the year. 

The SALM TAFE system is considered by the New South Wales Department of Education to be one of the largest education management systems in the world.  Our system deployment manages over 500,000 student enrolments annually, and will be used by around 26,000 New South Wales TAFE staff.

Sky Software, which we acquired in March 2014, is performing ahead of our expectations.  As previously announced, the Sky system underpins our student management system deployment on behalf of the British Council in over 100 training centres around the world.  Our delivery of this contract is progressing to plan.

Schools / K-12

Our work in schools and children's services is in line with our overall expectations.  In Asia Pacific, Human Edge, our schools student management system business which we acquired in June 2014, is now integrated into our wider business and is performing well.

Keith Evans, Chief Executive, commented "Tribal's credentials as a leading international provider of student management systems continue to grow with our successes in Asia Pacific and North America.  Our recent bolt-on acquisitions complement our pipeline of new customer contracts, and our investment in our international infrastructure and our product portfolio provide good underpinning for our growth into 2015 and beyond."

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Tribal Group plc	Tel: [phone]
Keith Evans, Chief Executive
Steve Breach, Group Finance Director
Weber Shandwick Financial Nick Oborne	Tel: [phone]

Editors' note:

Tribal is a leading provider of technology-enabled solutions to the education management market. We build world-leading education management software, and provide performance improvement and quality assurance solutions across universities, colleges and schools, in the UK and internationally.

We work in partnership with a wide range of organisations, including schools, colleges and universities, government agencies and large and small employers.

Tribal has around 1,400 staff and our work spans five continents across the world. More information about Tribal is available online at www.tribalgroup.com. 

This Statement has been prepared for and is addressed only to our shareholders as a whole and should not be relied on by any other party or for any other purpose. Tribal, its directors, employees, agents or advisers do not accept or assume responsibility to any other person to whom this Statement is shown or into whose hands it may come and any such responsibility or liability is expressly disclaimed.  This Statement may contain forward-looking statements and the financial information is unaudited. Any forward-looking statement has been made by the directors in good faith based on the information available to them up to the time of approval of this Statement and should be treated with caution due to the inherent uncertainties, including both economic and business risk factors, underlying such forward-looking information. To the extent that this Statement contains any statement dealing with any time after the date of its preparation, such statement is merely predictive and speculative as it relates to events and circumstances which are yet to occur and therefore the facts stated and views expressed may change. Tribal undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

 

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