London Capital H1 profit up sharply

LONDON (AFX) – Spread-betting firm London Capital Group which operates
Capital Spreads said its first-half profit rose almost five fold, buoyed by strong growth in customer numbers.

The company, which offers online financial spread betting and foreign exchange trading services, said pretax profit for the six months to June 30 came in at 1.65 mln stg, up sharply from 340,000 stg in the same period last year.

The improvement came on the back of sharply higher revenues, with turnover up 52 pct at 3.53 mln stg as customer numbers soared. The company said it had 6,740 live spread betting accounts by the end of the first half, up 135 pct on the year, while the average number of daily trades rose 191 pct to 4,307.

‘We have continued to experience strong trading with encouraging growth in both the number of live customer accounts and the daily trading volumes in the spread betting division,’ chief executive Frank Chapman said in a statement.

‘All of our business areas have started the second half of the year well and we continue to perform in line with market expectations.’

LCG shares closed at 116-1/2 pence yesterday, valuing the group at about 45 mln stg.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 4:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.