Procurri's H1 earnings up 1.4% with lift from government relief

PROCURRI Corp, a provider of data-centre equipment and life-cycle services for IT hardware, maintained relatively flat earnings of S$2.65 million for H1 FY2020 ended June, up 1.4 per cent from a year ago.

The company's core operations were hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, which sent the firm's net operating cash flows down 25.6 per cent to S$18.9 million. Customers delayed their purchasing decisions amid disruptions caused by Covid-19, the mainboard-listed company said.

Its gross profit also fell 16 per cent to S$32.9 million, due to higher allowances for stock obsolescence, arising from an increase in aged inventories and steeper write-downs on the US inventories.

Nevertheless, Procurri posted a 1.6 per cent increase in H1 revenue to S$110.5 million, lifted by S$5.5 million in other income, mainly comprising government relief programmes. These include the recognition of the loans forgiven under the US government's Paycheck Protection Program. The firm also reaped S$800,000 in foreign-exchange gains from the revaluation of US dollar-, pound sterling- and euro-denominated receivables.

Sean Murphy, Procurri's chairman and chief executive, said that the company faces an immense cloud opportunity despite the challenging operating conditions.

"We have taken this downtime to re-look at our business operations, implementing unified systems globally to drive a more data-analytics driven approach to improve efficiency for sustainable growth," he said.

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"We strongly believe that we are strongly positioned to take on more opportunities once the Covid19 global pandemic recovers and our internal processes have been strengthened as well to cater more efficiently to such anticipated demand."

Shares of Procurri closed flat at S$0.30 on Wednesday.