Audited Results for the year ended 31 august 2016

Capital for Colleagues plc, the investment vehicle focused on opportunities in the Employee Owned Business (‘EOB’) sector, is pleased to announce its audited results for the year ended 31 August 2016.

CHIEF EXECUTIVE’S STATEMENT

At the end of our second full year as an ISDX Growth Market-quoted company, I am pleased to report on another busy and productive period for Capital for Colleagues PLC (C4C) where we have succeeded in moving the company from “proof of concept” to “business as usual”.

Employee ownership is a successful business model which is acknowledged to improve productivity and create wealth while providing an environment of stable employment as well as the potential for attractive commercial returns for investors. We provide capital and practical assistance to existing and aspiring employee-owned businesses (EOBs) and help them to become effective and profitable organisations driven by the ethos of employee ownership. We tend to be sector agnostic in terms of business activity and we structure our investments to reflect the individual requirements and prospects of each investee company. As a result, the funding we provide is very flexible and takes the form of debt, equity or convertible hybrid financing structures. The premise underlying all of our investments is that they should facilitate the full engagement of employees in a business.

All investments also need to offer an eventual opportunity to exit or be expected to return capital as well as providing an attractive dividend or profit stream. Often, a prerequisite for C4C investing is the establishment of an Employee Benefit Trust (EBT) or an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) as a significant and active shareholder in the business.

During the year under review, we further developed and expanded our portfolio of private EOBs to sixteen. We believe that the unquoted EOBs in our portfolio now generate total annual turnover of around GBP 67 million and support around 550 jobs. At the year end we were also invested in twelve publicly-traded companies which have demonstrable employee engagement practices. They too yielded good returns on what is a small part of our portfolio.

In the year to 31 August 2016, the Company invested a further GBP 2.44million in new and existing investee companies and we now have investments across a range of business areas, from civil engineering to accountancy, reflecting the diversity of EOBs and the breadth of investment opportunities available to us.