LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - Tremor International said it had the financial strength to buy back $10m (£8.1m) of shares during the coronavirus crisis after reporting strong growth in 2019.
The video advertising technology company posted an 18% increase in revenue to $325.8m for the year to the end of December. Gross profit rose 24% to $138.5m and pretax profit fell to $3.6bn from $27.2bn.

The San Francisco-based company's shares jumped 24% to 141.65p at 15:08 BST.

Annual revenue was supported by the company's acquisition of multiscreen advertising business RhythmOne in April 2019. This offset a decline at Tremor's performance-based division.

Tremor said it was too early to judge the impact of the Covid-19 crisis but that its travel, hospitality and restaurants clients would be most affected. Utilities, pharmaceuticals and online sellers may be less affected, it said.

The company said it had net cash of $76.9m that would allow it to buy back $10m of shares and trade through the coming period of uncertainty created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Many companies have been scrapping distributions of capital to shareholders to hold onto cash during the crisis.

Tremor said it was monitoring costs and speeding up the integration of its acquisition of Unruly from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The deal gave Tremor exclusive rights to sell outstream video on more than 50 of Murdoch's titles with a guaranteed ad spend of £30m over three years.

Ofer Druker, Tremor's chief executive, said: "We have made a good start to 2020, most notably, executing on the acquisition of Unruly, which is directly in line with our strategy to focus on video, CTV and data, and provides us with further opportunities through which to drive material growth in our core markets.

"We continue to closely monitor the impact of Covid-19 across the world, with the health and safety of our staff of paramount importance. As a business we remain optimistic about the long-term prospects of the Company and we remain focused on delivering value for all our key stakeholders."

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