Aggreko in £235m stock value surge

This 6% rise was achieved even though the 2010 figure included earnings from several major one-off sporting events including football's World Cup.

Rupert Soames, chief executive of Aggreko and grandson of wartime leader Winston Churchill, projected "another year of good growth in 2012".

The London Olympics will be a major contract this year for Glasgow-based Aggreko, which has almost doubled the number of staff at its Dumbarton operation to nearly 400 in the last couple of years.

Aggreko has built a new factory for its operations at Dumbarton, which Mr Soames said would be opened officially by The Princess Royal in April.

Employees at Dumbarton design and assemble the kit which is used worldwide by Aggreko.

The company has consistently exceeded City expectations in recent times, and yesterday was no exception. Its stock was the stand-out gainer in the UK's FTSE-100 index of leading shares.

Aggreko shares jumped by 88p or 4% to £23.13, an all-time closing high, boosting the stock market worth of Aggreko to £6.18 billion. The shares hit an intra-day high of £23.21 during the session.

Broadly in line with its projection in December, Aggreko said yesterday its revenues had climbed by 14% to £1.4bn in 2011.

It noted that its trading profit of £341m for 2011 was up 26% on an underlying basis, stripping out the impact of major sporting events in 2010 and 2011.

The company noted that major sporting events in 2010 comprised the Fifa World Cup, the Vancouver Winter Olympics and the Asian Games, which together accounted for around £87m of revenue in that year.

It added that a "small amount" of revenue from the Asian Games and the London Olympics contracts had arisen in 2011.

Aggreko said that its business in North America had performed "extremely well". It added that its strategy of developing its presence in the upstream and downstream oil and gas sector in North America, through acquisitions and organic growth, had "paid off handsomely".

This sector, it noted, now represents the largest customer segment of its North American business.

Mr Soames highlighted a boost for Dumbarton from plans announced by Aggreko yesterday to make fleet capital expenditure of around £350m in 2012, up by about £30m on the figure signalled back in December.

Projecting further progress by Aggreko this year, in spite of a challenging economic backdrop, he said: "We are confident that the business will deliver strong growth in the first half of 2012. At this early stage of the year, we are more cautious about the second half of 2012, when, in any case, comparatives will be tougher.

"Overall, we continue to believe that we will deliver another year of good growth in 2012."

Andrew Nussey, analyst at stockbroker Peel Hunt, yesterday raised his forecast for Aggreko's pre-tax profits in 2012 from £352m to £370m, which he noted was ahead of a consensus figure of about £362m.

Commenting in the wake of Aggreko's results, analysts at Barclays Capital said: "Management is trying to keep a cap on expectations, saying it is more cautious about the second half, but consensus for 2012 is likely to increase. Europe, where we have some bearish forecasts, is said to have started the year well."

Aggreko is raising its total dividend for 2011 by 10% to 20.79p-a-share, with a final payout of 13.59p.

l UK industrial production fell by 0.4% month-on-month in January, data from the Office for National Statistics showed yesterday, confounding City expectations of a 0.3% rise and raising further worries over the momentum of the economy.

The manufacturing output component of industrial production rose by 0.1% in January.

Oil and gas extraction dropped by 3.3% month-on-month in January, and was down 23.9% on a year earlier.