FFastfill – exhibiting green shoots?

(By Philip Carnelley 9.00am 28th May 09) FFastfill, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company serving the financial derivatives industry, today announced results for its FY ended March 09. While we still wonder about an LSE listing for companies as small as this, it appears to be making good use of the £1m it raised through a placing last November explicitly to invest in its Asia-Pacific operations. See FFastfill placing raises £1m.

For the year, turnover was up 27% at £14.4m, (organic growth was 19%) with operating profit up 50% to £0.3m. Loss before tax was £0.4m. To address this, it is not relying on growth: it has implemented some staff reductions and infrastructure consolidation to trim costs for the forthcoming year. Growth there should be, however: it has a 12-month order book of £14.2m, of which £10m is SaaS fees – up 41% yoy, and further evidence, perhaps, that the SaaS model is taking off.

In his outlook, Exec Chairman Keith Todd – who many will know from his days as CEO of ICL – was bullish in his views: “in spite of recent market turbulence, the Board remains confident that the medium and long term fundamentals of our target markets are strong, and that our company is well placed to continue to grow its market share.”

Ffastfill is not the only company to be thriving despite the troubles of the beleagured financial services sector, as we have seen with another British software company, Fidessa (see Some bright spots amongst the clouds ) Like Fidessa, then, perhaps these are some green shoots of recovery? As we said yesterday - see Dwindling millionaires , there is some evidence that business sentiment is improving. It would be nice to think so.