A SMART meter company in East Lancashire says it remains profitable with a strong balance sheet of £3.5million, despite ‘challenging trading conditions’.

Bglobal said its metering had delivered an operating profit for the year to March 31 and benefited from cost saving measures taken earlier in the year.

It comes as the government revived a £11.7billion scheme to roll out smart meters to all homes and business between 2014 and 2019.

In a trading update, the Darwen-based firm said: “There was a marked slowdown in the volume of meter installations taking place in the industrial and commercial sector as a result of the uncertainty around the mass rollout of smart metering in the UK.

“However, Bglobal Metering has continued to see strong interest in its data services and in the last quarter of the financial year signed a contract with Npower to provide data collection and data aggregation services for a three year period.”

It said there had been a lot of interest in the energy management systems division Utiligroup’s ‘Supplier in a Box’ product range.

The statement continued: “This last financial year has been a transitional period for the group in which we have positioned ourselves so as to benefit from the opportunities that result from the evolution in our target markets.

"We remain confident that the group is well positioned to play a major role in the future development and direction of the market.”

Group chief executive Tim Jackson-Smith said: “The past six months have seen careful management of group costs while we continue the hard work that is necessary to put Bglobal in a position to gain maximum benefit from the roll-out of smart meters.”