CBT, the Irish-based software group, has announced record third-quarter results, with a 60 per cent increase in turnover to $30.4 million (£20.5 million) and an 85 per cent increase in after-tax profits to $6.3 million, or $6.1 million when recent after-tax acquisition costs are included.
Profits before tax have increased from $4.1 million to $7.1 million for the quarter which ended on September 30th.
For the first nine months of the year, turnover was $78.5 million, up 55 per cent on the same period last year, while net income rose to $13.834 million from $7.269 million the previous year.
The company, which has its headquarters in Clonskeagh in Dublin, provides interactive education software to many of the major US companies for use in software training programmes.
The increasing breadth of the group's information technology titles and growing partnerships with the major software sellers is continuing to drive the group forward, according to its chairman, Mr Bill McCabe.
CBT now has 11 strategic partnership agreements with software groups for the provision of training products. The group has significantly increased its spending on R&D over the last year from $2.9 million in 1996 to $4.9 million for the same quarter.
Mr McCabe said that customers were responding enthusiastically to the company's new products, CBT Campus and CBT Web Live Play. In total, said Mr McCabe, the company had managed to produce 61 new titles over the third quarter - the most titles produced in a quarter to date.
He said the other major development of the quarter was that CBT became the first training provider to receive 100 per cent "pure Java" certification from Sun Microsystems.
"We once again demonstrated our position as a preferred partner to software industry leaders, with the signing of a development and marketing agreement with the US air force, bringing our total strategic partner list to 11."
Mr McCabe said CBT's acquisition of Scholars.com and the alliance with Asymetrix Learning Systems had been great successes.
On the subject of growth in the whole sector, he expected the Internet to become an even more popular vehicle for training than it was at present. It has also been announced that CBT Systems, subsidiary of CBT Group, has concluded two new deals with US companies.
The first is a $1 million deal with MedPartners, the largest doctors' practice management company in the United States.
The deal involves CBT Systems implementing a worldwide interactive training programme for MedPartners' 26,000 employees.
The deal will run over three years and will make CBT titles available to both information technology professionals and end users at MedPartners.
The other signed deal is with the University of California, to provide an interactive technology training programmes. In August, Goldman Sachs placed CBT Systems on its recommended list after accepting CBT's growth predictions for the IT market worldwide.
