Pre-tax profits at the sports tech firm that decides questionable points in top GAA games and is behind the controversial VAR technology in football this year decreased by 7% to £13.68m (€15.9m).
New accounts for Hawk Eye Innovations Ltd show that the business recorded the decrease in pre-tax profits as revenues increased by 9% from £81.67m to £88.87m (€103.5m) in the 12 months to the end of March this year.
The pre-tax profits of £13.68m this year followed pre-tax profits of £14.76m in the prior year.
The firm paid out dividends of £11.13m this year.
The Hawk-Eye score detection technology has become an integral part of the big GAA match occasions at Croke Park over the last number of years.
The chief factor behind the drop in profit last year was the company ramping up its Research and Development (R&D) spend from £13m to £17m.
The directors state that the areas of focus of the R&D included artificial intelligence products (Al), cloud native video and optical tracking technologies, lightweight tracking technologies, analytics platforms, and broadcast products.
They state that there was strong revenue growth of £7.2m “reflecting new and expanded contracts with key clients”.
The directors state that the company’s increase in gross profit from £43.9m to £50.2m was “primarily driven by revenue growth reflecting the company’s continued global growth and cost efficiencies”.
At GAA games, Hawk-Eye operates on the basis of four cameras at either end of the ground, which capture and track the movement of the ball.
The income from GAA’s hurling and Gaelic football represents only a small fraction of Hawkeye’s revenues and is included in “other sports” where revenues this year decreased from £2.05m to £1.2m.
The accounts for the Sony owned firm show that revenues for the “UK and Ireland” this year increased from £17.04m to £20.12m.
Europe is the company’s largest market with revenues totalling £43.2m or 49% of total revenues this year.
The company’s revenues have been boosted in recent years with football leagues introducing Hawk-Eye controversial VAR technology around the world.
This is reflected in the new accounts showing that revenues from football at £66.57m has accounted for 75% of revenues this year.
The firm’s two other major revenue generators were tennis at £10.54m and cricket at £6.28m.
Numbers employed by the company this year increased from 680 to 682 as staff costs increased by 27% from £40.16m to £51m.
Directors’ pay reduced from £2.47m to £1.3m.
The profit this year takes account of combined non-cash depreciation and amortisation costs of £14.55m. The company recorded a post tax profit of £11.1m following a corporation tax charge of £2.45m.
Accumulated profits totalled £63.1m.
Reporting by Gordon Deegan
