Specialist motor manufacturer Allied Vehicles saw its pre-tax profits more than double from £1.85 million to £4.03m in the year to April as turnover rose 19 percent from £89 to £106m.
According to a Companies House filing, the company based in Glasgow’s Possilpark, saw earnings before interest, tax and depreciation rising 75 per cent to £5.1m.
The company, which sells and repairs vehicles for people with impaired mobility, said that it had expanded its export activity to include all major European countries and is now negotiating the supply of conversion kits to Central America.
“Our share of the UK motability market remained above 40 per cent but we also expanded private hire car sales and converted patient transport ambulances,” the company said in its strategic report for the year.
“Rentals, parts, bodyshop, defleet, mobility shop and service departments performed strongly during the year and we anticipate that this will continue.”
Allied Vehicles also highlighted that it had received funding from Scottish Enterprise to support a £2.5m programme of research and development of new products.
“This will help us to ensure that we have a team capable of generating world-class products that the company can bring to market,” the company said.
Its order bank is growing despite increased production, it said, and further growth is expected this year. "We feel that all the constituents are there for Allied Vehicles to improve on this excellent performance in "2015-16".
The company’s increased profits came in spite of a rise in administrative costs from £14.6m to £16.9m and the cost of sales growing £73.2m to £85.5m.
Directors’ pay doubled from £622,431 to £1.29m with the highest paid director being paid £728,828, up from £131,683 the year before. Directors’ pension costs rose from £82,307 to £133,522.
Average staff numbers, meanwhile, rose from 432 to 474 bringing staff costs up from £10.9m to £13.1m.
After paying no dividend the previous year, the company paid a dividend of £7.76 per share which amounted to total dividend payments of £440,000.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here