The company, which this month won the contract to print the new plastic Bank of England notes , due

Friday 26 September mr price home 2014 16.39 BST Last modified on Saturday 27 September 2014 00.05 BST
The company, which this month won the contract to print the new plastic Bank of England notes , due in 2016, said annual pre-tax profit would fall by about £20m from £77.3m last year. Market conditions were likely to remain tough and would take their toll on next year s profits, it said.
De mr price home La Rue has maintained its dividend through previous turbulent periods, but it has cut the first-half payout to 8.3p a share from 14.1p. The company will also review the dividend for year-end March 2013.
De La Rue s main activity is making paper and printing banknotes for central banks in 150 countries. Prices mr price home for paper have been under pressure for more than a year, while competition is pushing down rates for printing too.
The company was also hit by lower-than-expected conversions from machine-readable passports to the biometric variety it prints. Several passport contracts mr price home it had expected to be available for tender stayed with De La Rue s competitors. mr price home
At the company s annual meeting on 24 July, Rogerson said business would be weighted towards the second half of the year but that the order book was good and the board was confident of meeting profit expectations. mr price home But trading conditions dipped sharply in the past two months, with order volumes holding up but prices falling.
Some state-owned print works have entered the commercial market to use spare capacity and have undercut commercial printers, Rogerson said. In the short term, we clearly will continue to maintain our market share, and that means bidding at fairly keen prices. There s not much we can do about that.
In the longer run, the company will cut costs and invest in making the business more efficient. It will also increase efforts to create new anti-counterfeiting features at the research facility it opened last year near Basingstoke.
Charles Pick, an analyst mr price home at Numis Securities, mr price home described the news as grim. He said: This is a major warning and it is hard to easily see that currency division mr price home margins can revert mr price home even to last full year s levels unless some rivals to De La Rue go under.
The profit warning is De La Rue s second in less than a year . It has also suffered order delays in the past although its contract to print UK banknotes, including the new polymer £5 and £10 notes, for the next 10 years appeared to mark a revival in its fortunes.
Rogerson said securing mr price home the printing contract was important for De La Rue but that it would not start printing the new notes until next year. It has been printing money for the Bank of England since 2003.
De La Rue has been without mr price home a chief executive since Tim Cobbold left to run UBM at the end of March. The company s trading problems leave Cobbold s successor, Martin Sutherland, with his work cut out when he joins next month from BAE Systems. mr price home
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