Small caps round-up: Encore Oil, Chime Comms, Hutchison China...

9th Mar 2011 15:44

North Sea oil explorer Encore Oil is looking to float a new company made up of its exploration assets on AIM, while maintaining a "significant" shareholding. "The new company would raise the necessary capital to progress a high impact exploration drilling programme," it said alongside today's interim results."It would be expected that exploration of these assets would be at higher working equity levels than EnCore would have retained, and it is expected that this would also allow the retention of operatorship control which would likely have been lost via individual farm-outs."David Hart, an oil and gas analyst at Westhouse Securities, said the potential restructuring "looks promising". Most of the operational aspects of the numbers had already been flagged.Marketing services group Chime Communications grew profit before tax and one-off items by 40% in 2010 to £26.5m, or by 14% to £21.2m on a reported basis."Another brilliant year," cried the Bell Pottinger owner's chairman Lord Bell who, while "confident of 2011", is "cautious about UK and world GDP growth".China-based healthcare and consumer products group Hutchison China Meditech narrowed full-year losses to $2.6m from $5m in 2009 on revenues up 21% to $134.5m."The growth potential for Chi-Med is considerable," boss Christian Hogg said. "We view 2011 with optimism and look forward to delivering significant growth in shareholder value."Diagnosis software developer Medicsight hopes an increase in Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) software during the fourth quarter of 2010will continue into 2011.It also sees an increase in orders for the MedicCO2LON insufflator product following a worse than expected performance at the end of last year.While electricity output at Alkane Energy grew by 26% to 120GWh, this was partly offset by 21% decline in average electricity sales prices (after high prices in 2009), meaning revenues grew just 5% in 2010 to £6.6m, from £6.3m. Pre-tax profit for the coal mine methane (CMM) group fell from £2.1m to £1.3m."Our CMM operations have been profitable and cash generative even at the selling prices we have experienced in 2010. We are re-investing these funds with the aim of delivering both increased production and improved selling prices in 2011," said chairman John Lander.