Dialight PLC on Monday said a rise in costs hurt its annual loss; but said it remains confident looking ahead.
The London-based producer of LED lighting for heavy industrial applications revenue in 2023 dropped 12% to £148.8 million from £168.7 million the year before.
The firm swung to a pretax loss of £14.4 million from a £500,000 profit. This was due to overhead costs of £34.9 million.
Looking ahead, Chief Executive Officer Steve Blair said: ‘We anticipate challenging market conditions will persist through 2024 with longer than usual order cycles for major projects due to inflationary pressures, shortages of key skills, and economic uncertainty, particularly in our key US market. Despite this we continued to grow our sales pipeline by around 7% from December 2022, ending the year with a stronger opening order book for 2024 whilst maintaining short lead times to support our MRO business.
‘The group also continues to be successful in expanding its customer base into a wider range of process industries including aerospace, electric vehicles, and food & beverage, with several large contracts awarded in the year and further contracts expected as capital spending improves.’
‘With this background and with the refreshed strategy focussed on delivering medium-term benefits of the transformation project, the board remains confident of making progress in 2024,’ he added.
Dialight also said it has changed its financial year end from December 31 to March 31.
Separately, the firm announced that its new CEO, Blair, has stepped down as senior independent director, as well as his other company board committee appointments as he begins his journey as leader of Dialight.
Blair was appointed as CEO just last Friday after Fariyal Khanbabi stepped down from her role as CEO and as director of the company.
This follows chief financial officer Clive Jennings’ resignation in September, which led to the appointment of Carolyn Zhang, who became CFO on February 1.
Shares in Dialight were down 4.3% to 147.41 pence each in London on Monday morning.
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