EMIS Group - Interims

This is one I have written on in the past - see the categories list for more details or otherwise they describe themselves in today's statement as follows:
EMIS Group is the UK leader in connected healthcare software and services. Its solutions are widely used across every major UK healthcare setting from primary and community care, to high street pharmacies, secondary care and specialist services. Through integration and interoperability, EMIS Group helps clinicians share vital information, facilitating better, more efficient healthcare and supporting longer and healthier lives.

EMIS Group serves the following healthcare settings:

•        Primary and Community Care, under the EMIS brand, the UK leader in clinical IT systems for GPs and commissioners. EMIS Group products, including the flagship EMIS Web, hold over 40 million patient records and are used by nearly 6,000 healthcare organisations, including community-based teams. EMIS's patient.co.uk website is the UK's leading independent provider of patient-centric medical and well-being information and related transactional services.

•        Community Pharmacy, under the Rx Systems brand, the UK's single most used integrated community pharmacy and retail system.

•        Secondary and Specialist Care, under the Ascribe and Digital Healthcare brands. Ascribe is a leading software provider to 70% of the UK's NHS Acute Trusts and Boards, focused primarily on Hospital Pharmacy, A&E (holding over 30 million patient records), Mental Health and Patient Administration Systems.  Digital Healthcare is England's leading provider of diabetic eye screening and other ophthalmology-related solutions.

These markets are also supported, under the Egton brand, by the provision of specialist ICT infrastructure, software, hardware and engineering services.

EMIS which has a market cap. of £460 million has today announced their half year results which overall look fine and the company say that the financial performance is in line with their expectations.

These features earnings up by 16% on an adjusted basis which excludes amortisation and capitalised development costs, with these earnings were actually down 3%. This was on the back of revenues and operating profits being up by 39% and 27% respectively. Cash generation was also strong at £27 million and this helped to eliminate the £14.8 million of debt that they had coming into this year.

On the back of this they also increased the interim dividend by 15% to 9.2 pence which is ahead of the current 11% growth forecast for the full year dividend (17.8 pence) prior to these numbers, which suggests scope for an upgrade to the dividend forecasts. Last year they paid 8 pence at the interim and finals so if they repeat that this year then the full year dividend could be 18.4 pence which would put them on a yield of around 2.5%, while current earnings forecasts of around 41 pence leave them on 17.75x P/E. So overall not that cheap, but seems fair enough for a good quality business which is growing well in a market with some growing demand for some of its products, a healthy hold perhaps?