Games pair continue to hit all the right buttons
BRITISH video game developers already punch above their weight in an industry that often flies under the radar for UK investors.
Gaming has been revolutionised by the same move to online streaming services that has changed how people watch TV.
And updates from two AIMlisted companies, Frontier Developments and Team 17, showed the sector is doing better than ever. Frontier clinched an exclusive deal with Formula 1 to make management-style games for the racing series, which lets players run their own F1 teams.
Frontier’s game should debut in 2022 and will run for four seasons to 2025 if it hits targets.
Cambridge-based Frontier, which is led by British game design pioneer David Braben, has also bagged two further deals with unnamed groups.
And Team 17, the maker of the popular Worms franchise and collaborative cooking game Overcooked, reported record sales that ballooned 43pc to £62m in 2019. Profits rose from £8.7m in 2018 to £19m last year – and it has a pipeline of ten new titles for 2020.
Shares in both made gains, with Frontier closing 7.6pc higher, up 86p, to 1216p, while Team 17 reached 540p before ending up 1.8pc, or 9p, at 524p. Technology and defence group
Ultra Electronics jumped 8.5pc, or 162p, to 2068p, as annual profits more than doubled to £91m on a slew of new contract wins.
It added that trading has not yet been hit by the coronavirus.
But rival defence and aerospace group Meggitt was in the red, down 4.2pc, or 20.3p, to 463.5p, as bearish Berenberg analysts bumped its rating from ‘buy’ to ‘hold’ in the wake of the Covid-19 induced fall in air traffic. Chairman Sir Nigel Rudd spent £496,000 buying 100,000 Meggitt shares.
Elsewhere, Plus 500 co-founder Shlomi Weizmann bought 100,000 shares in the online trading group, setting him back £942,000. Its shares fell 2.6pc, or 23.8p, to 890p.
Traders kept a watchful eye on oil after prices dropped as much as 35pc on Monday, but rose 8pc yesterday in a modest gain, to around $37 a barrel.
It was a mixed bag for Londonlisted firms. Shell, the largest company on the London Stock Exchange, rose 3.3pc, or 43.2p, to 1348p, as UBS analysts said it has the ability to defend its all-important dividend despite the crash.
And after shedding almost a fifth of its value the day before, BP rose 3.4pc, or 10.7p, to 328.9p.
The FTSE 100 fell 0.1pc, or 5.54 points, to 5960.23 while the FTSE
250 was virtually flat, down just 0.1 point, to 17547.05, as Premier
Oil plunged by a further 12.3pc, or 3.21p, to 23p, after losing more than half of its value on Monday.
Cairn Energy shed another 15.9pc, or 13.6p, to 71.75p, while Mediterranean-focused Energean fell 7.8pc, or 34.5p, to 406p.
Mid-cap engineering and oilfield services firm Wood Group, which was also knocked by the sell-off, said it was ‘too early’ to forecast the impact that might come from the coronavirus outbreak and oil price drops. Shares fell 1.2pc, or 3.2p, to 268.6p, even as it revealed profits jumped to £115m in 2019 from £41m in 2018. Small oil producers including Jadestone Energy (up 8.7pc, or 4p, to 50p), Petrotal (up 18.2pc, or 2p, to 13p) and Trinity Exploration (up 16.1pc, or 0.95p, to 6.85p) sought to reassure investors that they were strong enough to withstand a hit.
Junior-market listed financial services and pawnbroking group
H&T surged 16.9pc, or 51.5p, to 357p, as turmoil on markets last year and the subsequent rise in gold prices boosted its pawnbroking. Profits jumped 45pc to £20.1m as revenues rose 15pc to £101m.