DAYSOFT, the Scottish contact lens maker, has lifted pre-tax profits by nine per cent to £1.7 million in its latest financial year - despite putting the brakes on advertising spend.

Daysoft typically invests hundreds of thousands of pounds per year in advertising, with activity in airlines, magazines and the London Underground helping it to win customers around the world.

It currently has an active user base of around 250,000 users, in markets stretching from the US and Canada through Europe to India, China, Australia and Japan.

Last year it pulled the plug on marketing spend on sold to build up inventories and ensure it could keep pace with demand from returning customers, which accounts for the bulk of its sales.

The strategy, alongside moves to improve manufacturing efficiencies at its Blantyre base, helped profits rise. And it failed to dent turnover, which remained steady at £10.3 million.

Founder Ron Hamilton said: "When we looked into 2013 we were [seeing] accelerating sales. I can use advertising as a balancing device. What I hadn't tested was radically curtailing [advertising].

"What we did last year was to radically curtail [advertising] and expected to see the level of sales diminish more rapidly. The result was we were able to glide through 2014 bringing up our production numbers back into a healthy stock level as we have moved into 2015.

"And we have switched advertising again quite aggressively in the past three, four, five months."

Daysoft, which employs more than 200 staff, unveiled its latest results in the week it manufactured its 500 millionth contact lens.

Mr Hamilton said the firm's latest results allowed it to make a final payment of £1.27m for redeemable preference shares. It had paid £1.59m for such shares the year before.

The company, which Mr Hamilton said does not carry debt, is preparing to launch a mobile responsive website this summer. The device, likely to be its biggest investment in technology this year, will allow consumers to order lenses on their mobile devices.

Mr Hamilton said: "We're in cutting edge of e-commerce technology and we are constantly refining marketing technology. Putting those two together gives us a really good competitive advantage.

"No other lens manufacturer attempts to sell direct to the consumer. Their business is tied up in supplying opticians who walk would away from them the minute they do.

"We could only do this because we had no customer base to be destroyed."

Daysoft, which dispatches around 2000 orders per day, is continuing to invest in protecting the intellectual copyright of its product in key markets, having recently secured patent protection in Japan. It holds European-wide copyright IP for its production process.

The model adopted by Daysoft allows it to offer customers daily disposable lenses more cheaply than its competitors by selling directly to the end user, thereby cutting out the retailer.

However the company does sell lenses through some independent retailers and European distributors.

Orders can be made 24 hours a day, with the company's website geared up to make transactions in multiple languages and currencies.

Mr Hamilton was an outspoken critic of Scottish independence ahead of last year's referendum. With most of Daysoft's orders generated south of the Border, he said the prospect of different prices and taxes between Scotland and England would have presented a risk to the business.

However, although he is critical of some aspects of the European Union, including the single currency, he is ambivalent about the prospect of Britain exiting the bloc in trading terms.

Mr Hamilton said: "I will watch it very carefully. I don't think there is a risk to the business whichever way it goes. We are already accustomed to dealing in quite major ways outside of Europe."

"Brussels is like Bellshill or Boston. For us the single market is the globe, not a single market as Europe."