Smaller companies report: Thursday close

This Is Money13 April 2012

SMALL caps finished in positive territory, as investors focused on a string of encouraging corporate and earnings news.

The FTSE Small Cap index ended 7.0 points higher at 2,863.6, while the FTSE 100 rebounded slightly to close up 6.3 points at 4,853.4.

Elite Strategies was putting in the best performance amongst small caps today, but the shares were supended from trading on the Alternative Index Market this afternoon at the company's request.

The shares were last quoted at 0.02p.The group announced this week that it had acquired a major stake in Retec Interface, which is in a trial agreement with BT.

DA Group was in play after the company kickstarted its first commercial deployment of mobile phone character-based products with Vodafone Group Services, following an agreement last year to provide services to Vodafone worldwide.

Under the terms of the agreement, the first product, an active screensaver known as 'The Head', will be available on a limited range of Vodafone's handsets in Europe.

DA said it will receive a share of the revenue generated from each active screensaver downloaded.DA shares ended 12p higher at 55p.

Buyers also came in for betinternet.com after the global online gaming group said it was aware their company was mentioned in relation to legal proceedings in New York, but stated that it is not involved with them in any way.

betinternet.com was expected to release its first half results today. It also stated that it now intends to announce its interim results on 4 February. Shares ended 1.37p ahead at 8.62p.

Separately, RII finished 0.63p higher at 4.5p after resuming trading following the reverse takeover of BioPartners.

It has placed 400m ordinary shares at ¾p, and is changing its name to Minster Pharmaceuticals.

On the earnings front, Interregnum gained 0.75p to 7.12p as the IT support services group revealed that first-half revenues soared by 370% to £3.3m and operating losses narrowed to £719,000 from £799,000.

A positive trading update also gave a lift to Invox, whose shares closed 36p higher at 281½p.

The company, which earns its money through the premium rate phone calls that competition winners must dial to redeem their prizes, said it believes that first-half earnings and the interim dividend will show a modest increase on the previous year.

And BTG climbed 6¾p to 93p as the company said it anticipates filing a formal response to the FDA's clinical hold on Varisolve.

On the downside, yesterday's news that Steve Taylor, one of the company's directors, resigned with immediate effect, continued to weigh on the shares of Dimension Resources, which lost 0.05p, or nearly 20% of their value, at 0.22p.

Finally, Osmetech was under pressure following the release of sharply higher interim losses.

Pre-tax losses increased to £936,000 from £548,000 in the first half. Osmetech shares ended down 0.35p to 3.32p.

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