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(Alliance News) - Northern Bear PLC on Wednesday reported a pretax loss and fall in revenue for its most recently ended financial year, as Covid-19, the uncertainty of Brexit and industry supply chain issues continued to impact the firm.
Shares in Northern Bear were down 4.4% at 54.00 pence each in London on Wednesday afternoon.
Newcastle Upon Tyne, England-based Northern Bear is a specialist building and support services company.
Pretax loss for the financial year ended March 31 was GBP1.6 million, having swung from a pretax profit of GBP1.8 million a year ago.
Revenue was GBP49.2 million, falling 9.6% year-on-year from GBP54.4 million.
Northern Bear has been impacted by industry-wide challenges in recent months with both availability and price inflation for construction materials.
Northern Bear's Roofing division has been most affected by these issues. The company added that the situation could provide a short term headwind to operations until industry supply and demand revert to more typical levels.
Despite this, the firm's Roofing division performed well in the second half of its financial year, in which there was generally no repeat of the previous year's severe winter weather which caused significant disruption.
Having taken significant sums from the government's Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme during the year and asking non-furloughed staff to take temporary pay reductions across the group, Northern Bear has decided against a final dividend.
If trading continues to improve, the company intends to resume dividend payments in the current financial year.
"The board will continue to assess dividend levels generally and our intention for the longer term remains to adjust future dividends in line with the group's relative performance, after taking into account the group's available cash, working capital requirements, corporate opportunities, debt obligations, and the macro-economic environment at the relevant time," the firm said.
The company maintains that its forward order book remains strong and should support its trading performance in the coming months, subject to potential supply chain challenges and the business-specific considerations, and whilst there remains a level of uncertainty over the long-term outlook for Covid-19.
"We regularly report that the timing of group turnover and profitability is difficult to predict despite the continued strong order book, and our results can also be volatile on a month to month basis," the company said.
By Amrit Sahota; newsroom@alliancenews.com
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