Shares in Swindon-based content engineering group Stilo International have bounced back strongly after tumbling last week when it announced a 38% fall in profits.
Stilo’s shares declined by more than 10% as it revealed its financial results for 2014, which showed earnings more than halved to £108,000 for the year. Pre-tax profits came in at £95,000. 
Total sales at the Windmill Hill-based group, which provides content processing technology and cloud content conversion to major tech firms, also went into reverse – down 16% to £1.26m.
Stilo specialises in helping organisations automate the conversion of their existing content into different XML (Extensible Markup Language) formats. Its products are used by commercial publishers, technology companies and government agencies and include organisations involved in the production and maintenance of technical documentation.
The firm blamed its troubles on a fall in software licence sales of its OmniMark core product – a specialist tool for content developers. However, it did win orders for OmniMark from customers as wide ranging as Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer, Japan’s Patent Office, the European Parliament and National Geospatial in the US.
During the year it achieved a 42% growth in revenues for Migrate, the world’s first cloud XML content conversion service, with prestigious new customers such as Kaplan Professional Education, Pitney Bowes, SAP, Intel, Unicef and Cray.
It also said it had made “encouraging” progress with developing AuthorBridge, a ground-breaking XML content authoring solution for non-technical users.
Chairman David Ashman said: “We are disappointed to report that our sales revenues and profits decreased year on year. An anticipated reduction in OmniMark software orders was partially offset by a 42% increase in revenues for Migrate, our cloud conversion service, which continues to strengthen its position in the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) XML conversion market.
He also said the shelving of a major conversion project by a European customer significantly impacted Stilo’s final results.
However, the firm was very encouraged by preliminary customer feedback for AuthorBridge, which is scheduled for initial release in the coming months, said Mr Ashman.
“We consider AuthorBridge as a potentially disruptive technology in the world of XML authoring and look forward to it making a significant contribution to our future financial performance,” he said.
Stilo’s shares, which were trading at a near four-year low of 2.12p last week, have since recovered and yesterday closed at 2.75p.
