Updates and Ideas

Mears - High visibility of earnings

October 2005

Investing in shares may lose you all or some of your money. Past performance is no indication of future performance. Some of the shares recommended here may be small company shares, which can be relatively illiquid and hard to trade and this makes such shares more risky than other investments.

Mears (266p; MER,) which is involved in the provision of maintenance services, predominantly for social housing, is an old friend to Sharewatch. We first recommended the shares at 58p in March ‘01, when we also added them to Growth Portfolio II and since then, both profit and share price has continued to climb with barely a pause. The compound annual growth rate in adjusted pretax profit and earnings in the three years 2003-2005 (including forecast) is 39% and 34% respectively.Mears seems to have struck gold as the transfer of council owned housing to housing associations has opened up a lot of backlog maintenance. Most of the reactive maintenance work comes in the form of three year term contracts for day to day repairs, su ...

To access our archive of articles and to receive current issues you need to subscribe.

Subscribe now

Already a subscriber? Login

Staffline - Prospective PE of 10 for next year

Growth Portfolio 2

Mears (May 2012)

Mears (February 2012)

Mears (December 2011)

Mears - 93% of forecast sales in the bag (June 2011)

Mears (November 2010)

Mears (September 2010)

Mears - 91% off consensus forecast in the bag (July 2010)

Mears - No public sector worries here (May 2010)

Mears (January 2010)

Mears - Possible interest in Claimar Care? (May 2009)

Mears - Eps enhancing acquisition (February 2009)

Mears (January 2009)

Mears (December 2008)

Mears - Close to 52-week high (September 2008)

Mears - Record Â£1.6bn order book (August 2008)

Mears - New year NAP moves to 52-week high (May 2008)

Mears - Arbuthnot sets 400p share price target (March 2008)

Mears - String of upbeat announcements (February 2008)

Mears - Fantastic year for new orders on social housing side (January 2008)

Mears (September 2007)

Mears - Bolt on acquisition in domiciliary side (July 2007)

Mears (April 2007)

Mears - Shares up five-fold since recommendation (February 2007)

Mears (September 2006)

Mears (April 2006)

Mears (February 2006)

Mears - 81% of sales forecast in the bag (April 2005)

Mears - Gain to date: 236% (September 2004)

Mears (July 2004)

Mears - Says 100% of sales forecast is secure (April 2004)

Mears (February 2003)

Mears (January 2003)

Mears - Gain to date: 98% (May 2002)

Mears - Doubles order book after winning Richmond Â£130m contract (February 2002)

With small companies there is an above average degree of risk compared to buying blue chips. Please be aware that we have not assessed the suitability of any of these investments for you. The newsletter simply states a personal view and diarises the editor’s investment decisions. Please speak to your stockbroker or other qualified individual to ascertain whether any of these companies mentioned would form useful additions to your own portfolios. Past performance is no indication of future success.

All material on this website is protected by copyright. You may use Information retrieved from the www.scsw.co.uk website for your own personal non-commercial use which means that you may not sell or copy this information to any third party without prior written consent. ISSN 1358-183X