Staffline narrowly beats expectations despite deteriorating job market
Temporary staffing provider Staffline has swung from black to red as a job market uncertainty weighed on its 2023 operations.
The firm, which has three business units across the UK and Ireland, said profit after tax swung from a £3.8m gain in 2022 to an £11m loss for 2023.
Revenue grew by 1.1 per cent year-on-year to £938.2m during the period, while an underlying operating profit of £10.3m narrowly beat expectations despite a 14.2 per cent fall.
The UK recruitment side of the business reported its fourth consecutive year of underlying profitable growth of £8.6m and a revenue bump of £11.2m to £763m from £751.8m the year prior.
Staffline’s recruitment unit in Ireland, meanwhile, was hit with a reduction of 500,000 temporary worker hours compared to the previous year, which wiped £2.3m off the unit’s revenue for the year, which was £108.3m.
Gross profit for the period came in at £12.3m against £12.9m in 2022.
The third unit of the business, adult skills and training service Peopleplus was restructured during the year, shifting away from in-person training to digital.
As a result, the ‘skills’ division of the unit incurred losses and exit costs of £3.1m.
However, Peopleplus revenue increased by 1.8 per cent, from £65.7m to £66.9m, based on the continuing strength of its contracts in the justice and employability sectors.
Tom Spain, group chairman, said Staffline returned an all-round “robust performance” despite being hamstrung by several socio-economic factors.
“With a combination of higher interest rates and a gloomy outlook for the UK economy our luck was out in 2023 and it would have been easy to adjust the goal posts,” he said.
“But credit to our management teams and staff, we found a way to deliver robust performance,” he said.
Spain continued that in the business journey to try and be the cheapest, best and most convenient for the customers, it’s almost impossible to win at all three.
“There are three ways we can continue to grow our brand: be the cheapest, be the most convenient or be the best. It is an extremely rare thing for any company to do all three – we will attempt to be the best and try for one more.”
He also said that while the company’s future share price is unknown, it intends to generate more cash and “will not be slow” in using some of that in buybacks if possible.