British customer numbers rose by nearly a third in the year to November, IG said, rejecting some analysts' concerns that growth in the UK has peaked. "We definitely don't think that's the case," IG Finance Director Steve Clutton told Reuters in an interview.
"If you draw a chart of the number of clients trading each month it pretty much goes up in a straight line. We think the market's surprisingly undeveloped." Analysts at stockbrokers KBC Peel Hunt wrote in a note: "We remain of the belief that the UK business has gone ex-growth. "Against a backdrop of increasing maturity and client churn in the UK, IG is ramping up marketing expenses and this will start to eat into margins."
IG has just 35,000 British clients who trade actively, compared with over 1 million personal share dealing accounts across the UK, Clutton said. Over the last ten years, IG has expanded into mainland Europe, Australia, the US, and the Far East, but still generates more than half its sales in Britain.
IG's British sales were flat in the six months to November 30, it said on Tuesday, blaming a spike in revenues a year earlier as volatile share prices during the 2008 global banking crisis encouraged a surge in trading activity. Shares in the company, which had risen 16 percent since the end of November, were down 2 percent by 1204 GMT, underperforming a 0.8 percent decline in the FTSE 250 share index.
IG raised its half-year dividend by a quarter to 5 pence per share, and said it had paid 2 million pounds to buy a small South African contracts for difference firm. The company also said it had opened an office in Beijing to lobby for a relaxation of China's ban on gambling. "It's very much about planting a flag in the ground in the hope that over the years gradually the financial regulatory regime will relax, and we'll be able to offer our products," IG's Clutton said.