Christie Group – excellent bounce back, better than expected, indicates shares now 85p are heading higher, broker's valuation 250p

 28.04.2025         

This morning’s announcement of the Final Results for 2024 from the Christie Group (LON:CTG), which offers a range of professional services designed to create ‘value and opportunity’ for its stakeholders.

It enjoys strong market positions in its specialist sectors, offering synergistic services through the ‘life cycle’ of a business and has a high degree of repeat and referral work.

The group returned to profit after a progressive year and a strong second-half.

Revenues were up 15.4% to £60.4m (£52.3m), while adjusted pre-tax profits were £1.0m as against the previous £0.5m loss, earnings came in at 4.4p (0.2p), the dividend was increased to 2.3p from 1.0p per share previously, and net cash rose to £4.9m (£0.6m).

The Business

It is a leading professional business services group with 32 offices across the UK and Europe, catering to its specialist markets in the hospitality, leisure, healthcare, medical, childcare & education and retail sectors.

The company operates in two complementary business divisions: Professional & Financial Services (PFS) and Stock & Inventory Systems & Services (SISS).

These divisions trade under the brand names: PFS - Christie & Co, Pinders, Christie Finance and Christie Insurance: SISS - Venners and Vennersys.

The group, which can trace its origins back to 1896, has a long-established reputation for offering valued services to client companies in agency, valuation services, investment, consultancy, project management, multi-functional trading systems and online ticketing services, stock audit and inventory management.

The diversity of these services provides a natural balance to the group's core agency business.

Management Comment

CEO Dan Prickett stated that:

"2024 was a year of progress for our Group, following on from the acute challenges we faced in 2023.

We returned the Group to a positive full year trading performance, completed the successful divestment of our loss-making retail & pharmacy stocktaking brand, Orridge, and continued with our plans to evolve our International brokerage business into a multi-sector offering with the launch of Healthcare in France, having launched the same sector in Germany in 2023.

Demand for our services and pipelines remains robust and the Group is well placed to deliver on its plans for the year ahead."

Analyst View

After this morning’s results which beat his estimates, analyst Rob Sanders, at Shore Capital Markets, considers that this group’s shares are significantly undervalued and implies a valuation of 250p on its shares.

His estimates for the current year, to end-December 2025, are for a rise in group revenue to £65.9m (£60.4m), lifting its adjusted pre-tax profits yet again to £1.8m (£1.0m), generating earnings of 5.2p (4.4p) and paying out a 2.8p (2.3p) per share in dividend.

For 2026 he goes for £71.2m revenues, £2.8m profits, 8.2p of earnings and giving a 4.0p dividend per share.

Stretching further into 2027 his estimates are for £76.8m turnover, profits of £4.0m, with 11.8p earnings and a per share dividend of 5.0p.

In My View

This group’s shares at just 85p are too cheap to ignore, especially if one considers the broker’s estimates going forward and that he £22.5m-capitalised group has some £4.9m of net cash.

These shares are heading a lot higher and soon breaking above the 100p barrier.