LSEG London Stock Exchange Group Plc

By Sabela Ojea

London Stock Exchange Group PLC on Thursday reported a more-than-doubled pretax profit for 2021 after strong growth across all of its businesses, and said that it is confident about its outlook.

The FTSE 100 stock-exchange and financial-information company posted a pretax profit of 987 million pounds ($1.32 billion) compared with GBP492 million a year earlier.

Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization--a metric that strips out exceptional and other one-off items--rose 8.3% to GBP3.28 billion. The company's performance was above market views of adjusted Ebitda at GBP3.23 billion, taken from its compiled consensus.

The group's total income excluding recoveries rose to GBP6.81 billion from GBP6.77 billion for the prior year. Total income was expected to be GBP7.13 billion, according to the group's compiled forecasts.

Regarding its costs, the company said its cost-synergy plan is running significantly ahead of target, achieving a run rate of GBP151 million. There will be an additional GBP50 million in cost synergies, increasing its five-year target to at least GBP400 million a year, LSEG said.

In October, the company said it was comfortably on target to deliver a full-year run rate cost synergy of GBP125 million, ahead of plan.

LSEG's operations in Russia and Ukraine account for less than 1% of total income, it added.

The board declared a 27% increase in its full-year dividend of 95 pence a share, after proposing a final dividend of 70 pence a share.

"All of our businesses produced good results and are well positioned in markets demonstrating strong growth," Chief Executive David Schwimmer said.

Write to Sabela Ojea at sabela.ojea@wsj.com; @sabelaojeaguix

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 03, 2022 03:07 ET (08:07 GMT)

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