Gordon Deegan
The business that operates the National Car Test (NCT) clocked up weekly revenues of €1.55 million in 2019 as pre-tax profits jumped 19% to €5.92 million.
New accounts show Applus Car Testing Service Ltd’s revenues increased marginally to €80.84 million in 2019.
The 10-year NCT contract operated by Spanish-based Applus concluded last June and the firm successfully re-tendered for a new 10-year contract.
The company carried out a total of 1.39 million full tests in 2019, up from 1.27m full tests the previous year. However, last year the impact of Covid-19 contributed to the number of full tests reducing to 1 million.
Covid hit
The directors state two significant unexpected events - Covid-19 and test centre lift faults in 2020 “will cause future results to differ materially from expected results”.
Due to Covid-19, test centres shut on March 28th last and did not re-open until June 8th, with the company forced to temporarily lay-off the vast majority of staff for the period.
The directors also said the need to fix defects in test centre lifts at the start of 2020 “is expected to cause an increase in overhead driven by headcount costs to eliminate any backlog that is outstanding when the lift issue is rectified”.
The revenues from National Car Testing increased from €71.38 million to €74.25 million in 2019 while the company also generated €4.5 million from VRT Import Conformance Inspection and €1.6 million from ‘ancillary revenue’.
The national car test was introduced in 2000 on foot of an EU directive.
Numbers employed by the company remained static at 802 as staff costs increased from €34.34 million to €36.33 million.
