Market update covering dividend, AGM and current trading FDM has announced that it will be no longer be recommending the payment of the final dividend to 31st Dec 2019. The group’s B/S is strong with FY19 cash of £37m, but to give maximum resilience to the business it has decided to preserve the cash on the B/S at this stage, although it keeps the option open of considering one or more interim dividends depending on how the trading backdrop evolves during the year. The company is suspending its AGM due 29th April to a date no later than 30th June, based on the social distancing advice currently given by government. Current trading To date the company has seen only minimal impact to current trading from the COVID-19 fall out, with only a relatively small number of Mounties being returned by clients. Nearly all Mounties across the business are working from home on billable projects. However, at this stage the company cannot predict what the impact will be on the business as this will depend on the evolving situation around the global management of COVID-19 and associated economic impact. Our view We would expect some impact on forecasts in due course, but at this stage do not know what the scale of the impact will be. We can run various scenarios, but with the strong B/S we would see FDM trading through this period of uncertainty with its model intact and re-growing the business as conditions stabilise. As such, we place our forecasts under review until we have more data points to enable us to construct a meaningful forecast outlook.