This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on September 4, 2019

KUALA LUMPUR: UWC Bhd, a newscomer on Bursa Malaysia’s Main Market, said its net profit for the fourth quarter ended July 31, 2019 (4QFY19) came in at RM10.07 million against a revenue of RM46.91 million.

This brings the integrated engineering support services provider’s full-year (FY19) net profit to RM36.24 million, up 16.1% from RM31.22 million in the preceding year. Full-year revenue meanwhile rose 5.8% to RM144.35 million from RM136.5 million, on stronger demand.

UWC, in its stock exchange filing yesterday, said contributing to the quarterly profit and revenue were the group’s sheet metal fabrication and assembly, as well as machining segments, mainly from its semiconductor industry customers.

There are no comparative figures for the preceding year’s corresponding quarter, as this is the second interim financial statement from the group.

For the full year, UWC said the group was more profitable due to higher requirements demanded by its customers, such as more stringent quality requirement and higher complexity of product manufactured, which led to higher gross profit margin.

There was a disposable gain of an old factory, which increased its profit before tax, it added.

Going forward, it said despite the ongoing US-China trade tensions and unfavourable global economic outlook, the group remains optimistic about the current year’s business prospects, although the group did caution against softer demand during the year-end festive season.

“The group will continue to develop more first article products with existing and new customers, improve technology development, [and] process improvement and automation to ensure the sustainability of the group, along with extensive human capital development and further foster our customer relationships to grow the business further,” it added.

The stock rose two sen or 1.32% to close at RM1.54 yesterday, bringing it a market capitalisation of RM564.87 million.

Its share performance shines compared with other new listings such as HPMT Holdings Bhd (which closed at 34.5 sen yesterday, down 38% compared with its IPO price of 56 sen in June), and Leong Hup International Bhd (which at its current price of 83.5 sen, has lost about one-fourth of its value since its May listing at RM1.10).