A stock the market Loves to hate?

XL Media (XLM) - the Israeli, Aim Listed on line performance marketing company has announced interim results today. These look pretty strong with revenues up by 33% driven by a similar level of organic growth in their highly profitable publishing division which makes up 44% of their business.  This helped to make up for slower organic growth and lower margins in their media business & a fall of 25% in turnover from their partner networks operations which make up the remaining 56% (50% & 6% respectively) of the business. They also completed some acquisitions in financial & cyber security verticals in the US and in the mobile gaming area which helped to boost revenues in the media business.

The dividend was increased by 5%, which is a bit better than the marginal growth that is reflected in current consensus forecasts, so these could be upgraded if analysts bother to note that. More interestingly in the Outlook and headlines where they said: "The Board is therefore confident of comfortably meeting profit expectations for the full year..." which I take to mean they think they will probably easily beat current forecasts of 14c per share. This looks likely as even if the 2nd half was flat, then by my calculations, they would still come close to 14c. Thus there may be scope for some upgrades here if analysts share my opinion, but maybe the Company will steer them to keeping unchanged numbers so they can beat them later in the year? There will be a webcast of the results presentation which will be available on their website later today at: http://www.xlmedia.com/media/.

So overall a decent looking set of numbers which leaves the potential for some upgrades or a beat of full year numbers if upgrades don't come through in the short term. Of course being an Israeli company listed on AIM with a somewhat opaque business model, this is not one for everyone and indeed maybe one that the market loves to hate. Despite that it does have good financial metrics and has delivered growth of over 20% per annum in eps since 2011, although this may not be sustainable at this rate as they seem to be needing to make acquisitions now to keep the growth going which is potentially more risky. This new phase may well have been highlighted by big holders selling down in the last year or so, although I note the CEO still has a decent stake in the business. Given all that the quantitative scoring systems such as Stockopedia & our own Compound Income Scores continue to rate it highly at 97 & 98 respectively. So on about 12x with a 4.5% growing yield it will remain the CIS Portfolio and might be worthy of further investigation if you are not put off by the nature of it or think that the market will continue to love to hate it.