Aberdeen half-year profit rises 8.5 percent

By Laurence Fletcher Reuters - Tuesday, May 6 08:28 am

LONDON (Reuters) - Aberdeen Asset Management said on Tuesday that pretax profit before exceptional items and amortisation of intangibles for the six months to end-March rose to 47.3 million pounds, below some forecasts.

Analysts had expected profits of between 48 million pounds and 51 million pounds. A year ago the group reported a profit of 43.6 million pounds.

However, assets under management stood at 107.3 billion pounds at end-March, the group said, ahead of forecasts.

The interim dividend is 8 percent higher at 2.8 pence.

The group also said it had agreed to acquire Goodman Property Investors for an initial 89 million pounds, plus further payments linked to assets under management, and will fund the acquisition by issuing 65.1 million new shares.

Aberdeen has also identified annualised cost savings of more than 15 million pounds.

"What tends to happen when you're expanding as rapidly as we have been ... is that there isn't the same rigour as you'd expect. It's general housekeeping, not replacing people when they leave, looking at what you spend money on," Chief Executive Martin Gilbert said on a call to journalists.

He said there would not be redundancies among the firm's fund managers.

He said the cost savings and the placing "ensure we continue to have the flexibility to look for other opportunities".

Aberdeen has made a number of acquisitions in recent years, including the active U.S. equity asset management business of Nationwide Financial Services and some Australian fund management businesses from Deutsche Bank last year and the UK arm of Deutsche Asset Management in 2005.

However, in January the firm said it was not interested in buying rival F&C Asset Management .

(Editing by Rory Channing)

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