Genuit Group PLC on Tuesday upped its annual dividend slightly, despite profit plummeting.

Genuit is a Leeds, England-based plastic pipes manufacturer, formerly known as Polypipe.

Revenue rose by 4.7% to £622.2 million in 2022 from £594.3 million in 2021. UK revenue jumped 5.0% to £560.8 from £534.1 million. The company said this was significant as it outperformed the wider UK construction market, which grew just 1.6% annually.

However, pretax profit fell by 28% to £45.4 million from £62.9 million.

Genuit explained that profit was hurt by heightened levels of non-underlying items. These increased to £40.0 million from £34.1 million in 2021, and were driven by non-cash amortisation and impairment charges of £30.0 million, up from £14.2 million.

The company added that results also suffered from a cyber incident that affected its production facility in south Wales during the second quarter of 2022. This cost the company £1.2 million.

Genuit declared a final dividend of 8.2 pence, unchanged year-on-year. This lifted the full-year dividend marginally to 12.3 pence from 12.2p.

Genuit said that so far in 2023, the company has traded in line with expectations. However, it expects ‘challenging and uncertain’ market conditions to continue into 2023. It also anticipates lower volumes as seen in the second half of 2022.

Shares in Genuit were down 1.2% to 276.22 pence each in London on Tuesday morning.

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