In a management statement it listed a range of actions it is taking in the face of difficult market conditions.

These include:

* cost savings of £5m impacting the current financial year;

*in addition, redundancies have been made in those areas of the business experiencing reduced demand; other staff have been redeployed into more buoyant areas within the public sector such as healthcare, education and infrastructure. It is anticipated that redundancy costs of £1.1m will be charged in the results for the half year. On an annualised basis these redundancies are expected to save £4m;

*restrictions on capital expenditure have been introduced to conserve cash.

Profit in the first half of the year is now expected to be slightly lower than the equivalent number last year before charging the cost of the redundancies.