Ceres narrows losses in 'most successful' year to date

UK-based fuel cell technology and engineering company Ceres Power said on Wednesday that the financial year ended 30 June had been its "most successful" to date, beating financial expectations on increased revenue and narrowed losses.

Ceres increased revenue 140% to £4.1m over the year from the £1.1m it posted in 2016 thanks to the firm securing two more "world-class" customers and its partnerships with Honda and Nissan helping turn the AIM-listed firm into a "robust, highly-efficient, low-carbon technology" business that operated on existing fuels, such as natural gas and biofuels.

The greater revenue brought Ceres to a pre-tax loss of £11.4m for its 2017 fiscal year which, will still in the red, marked an approximate 10% improvement on the £12.6m it had lost in the previous year.

EBITDA loss also dropped, moving down 11% to finish the year at -£10.3m.

The group said that its continued investment into "people, technology and operations to support growth into higher power applications" lead to its narrowed losses.

Chief executive Phil Caldwell said, "This has been our most successful year to date. We are ahead of expectations financially and are on track to meet our commercial objectives."

"Our ability to sign new commercial agreements and then generate revenues working alongside our partners has enabled us to accelerate the technical development of the SteelCell and explore new applications, giving Ceres Power's technology access to opportunities in our target markets including the Residential, Commercial, Data Centre and Electric Vehicles sectors," Caldwell added.

Ceres said it had made "good progress" in its efforts to secure a fifth global engineering client and was expecting top-line revenue to continually grow over the 2018 financial year after its order book had ballooned from £1.73m to £3.2m in just twelve months.

As of 1535 BST, shares had slipped 2.57% to 13.76p.