Eckoh recommends maiden divi, losses widen

6th Jun 2011 07:18

Speech recognition specialist Eckoh said full year pre-tax losses widened as it recommends its first dividend payment and announced a new contract with NIE Energy to develop a smartphone application. The group, which underwent a massive reorganisation to focus solely on its speech recognition solutions business, said loss before taxation widened to £615,000 from a loss of £197,000 previously on higher finance costs. Revenue from continuing operations rose to £9.0m from £7.9m. Eckoh took an impairment charge of £1.225m after the settlement of a loan owed to the company by Redstone. Adjusted pre-tax profit rose to £1.1m during the year from £0.7m in 2010.Chief executive officer Nik Philpot commented, "We have entered the new financial year focused on accelerating the growth of our business driven by a healthy new business pipeline and underpinned by our strong balance sheet." The board recommends a full year maiden dividend of 0.1p per share. Eckoh, which provides customer service solutions using speech recognition, and complementary services on the web and mobile said it is encouraged with the medium term outlook. In overall terms the sales pipeline is looking strong and as we develop our indirect sales channels during the year we would expect this to strengthen further, Eckoh said. CJ