Pictured: Brendan Mooney, CEO, Kainos.
The latest results from Belfast-headquartered Kainos show the company is heading for nine consecutive years of growth following on from “an exceptionally strong performance” in the first half of the year.
Headed up by chief executive Brendan Mooney, Kainos is a digital technology that builds innovative software platforms, with major part of its business in the healthcare space. Brendan joined Kainos in 1989 as a graduate software engineer and has worked in a number of roles and locations with the company, before being appointed CEO in 2001.
Recent performance
As CEO, Brendan manages 1,300 staff across 11 offices in Europe and the US, with recently established outposts in Frankfurt and Copenhagen. The next new territory will be Canada. As one of Northern Ireland’s most successful indigenous IT companies, its growth and expansion in Northern Ireland has created hundreds of high quality, well-paid jobs in Belfast and Derry.
The last nine years have seen a continuing growth trend for the company and it listed on the main market at the London Stock Exchange in 2015, with shares priced at 405 GBX (£4.05) at the time of writing. Recent results announced in November show Kainos grew its revenue in the first six months of 2018 by 62 per cent to £67.2 million. Over the same period, the company’s pre-tax profits jumped by 28 per cent from £6.8 million to £8.7 million.
The results highlight the strength of its financial position, with £38.8 million of cash, no debt and net assets totalling £45.8 million in the six months to September 30th.
Commenting on the results, Brendan said:
The group’s pipeline of prospects continues to strengthen across all divisions and the board believes that the group is well positioned for growth both in the short term and in the coming years.”
Leadership
The vision of the company, under Brendan’s leadership, is to “Enable outstanding people to create digital solutions that have a positive impact on people’s lives.” Underlining this are the company values: determined; creative; honest; respectful; cooperative. The staff have rated Kainos as one of the Sunday Times Top 100 Best Companies To Work For five years in a row.
As a leader Brendan has developed a culture which recognises that the success of the company is dependent on the capability of its workforce. To this end, Kainos has shown its appreciation and value of employees by distributing 1.8 million free shares to staff and, up to July 2018, had awarding a further 2.3 million options to staff. The company has stated that it will pay an interim dividend of 2.8 pence per share for the six months to end-September on December 28th.
Engaging with the community, each year the staff nominates two charities to support through fund-raising activities and this year, have donated £110,000 to charity. The company’s staff also create and run pioneering social outreach initiatives through its ground-breaking Tech Outreach programme, which helps thousands of young people improve their digital skills.
Innovation
Clients of Kainos are predominantly in the Public, Health and Financial Services sectors, and include over 150 well-known global organisations and large government departments, ranging from the NHS to Chanel to Netflix. Innovation is at the core of what the company does, with pioneering digital platforms used by public and private sector organisations across the globe deliver better customer outcomes, improve service and reduce costs.
Backstory
In addition to his role at Kainos, Brendan has been a Non-Executive Director at Meridio, Property News, the Probation Service for Northern Ireland and, until recently, was a serving Lay Magistrate.
In 2013 Brendan was the recipient of an honorary Doctor of Science (DSc) from the University of Ulster in recognition of his services to business development and in 2016 received an honorary Doctorate (DSc Econ) for services to business and commerce from Queens University Belfast.
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