Courteville Issues Profit Warning One Year After Blowing N1 billion On New Head Office

Courteville Business Solutions has issued a profit warning claiming that they expect their 2015 full year results to be bad. According to the company, they expect additional write-offs of about N145 million due to receivables that they expect could go bad. The company blamed the naira, falling exchange rate, reduction in allocation to state governments and the dwindling foreign currency reserve as the major reason. According to Couteville, these have affected the ability of state governments to pay them their money.

Courteville has the franchise for popular motor vehicle registration platform Auto-Reg and operates in on behalf of many states in Nigeria. Their claims therefore suggest that state governments do not pay them fees collected from the vehicle registrations. The company had released a pre-tax profits of about N300 million in the 9 months ending September 2015 an 18% drop from the year before. Revenue was however up 16% to N1.2 billion.

The company launched its N1 billion new head office building in 2014.The company currently has a negative working capital of N166 million and owed over N700 million in trade receivables. Courteville also reported a trade debtors of about N653 million up 11% from the same period 2014.