KVB Kunlun (KVB) released its financial report for the first half of 2018 this Monday. The foreign exchange broker and liquidity provider saw a sharp uptick in its year-on-year revenues and post-tax profits.
The report comes a month after KVB announced they were expecting a significant improvement on last year's results. In that announcement, the firm noted that income from the fair value gain on the derivative portion of convertible bonds had given it a boost.
In the first half of 2017, KVB saw total revenues of HKD 197.11 million ($25.11 million). For the same period this year, that figure increased by a massive 55.3 percent to HKD 306.23 million ($39.01 million).
This growth was largely driven by an increase in the firm’s leveraged trading revenues. Today’s report shows that, in the first half of this year, KVB raked in HKD 233.46 million ($29.74 million) in revenue from its leveraged trading business. That was a 47.8 percent increase on last year’s HKD 157.97 million ($20.12 million).
Expenses up
Unfortunately for KVB, expenses in the first half of this year were also up massively. Last year, the firm reported expenses of HKD 188.78 ($24.05 million) for the first half of the year. Monday's report indicates that this year, that number was HKD 273.52 million ($34.84 million) - an approximately 44.9 percent increase.
Despite the increase in expenses costs, KVB was able to record a drastic increase in pre-tax profit. For the first half of this year, the firm reported pre-tax profit of HKD 20.47 million ($2.61 million). This was a nearly three-fold increase on 2017 when the firm reported pre-tax profits in the first half of the year as HKD 7.18 million ($910,000).
The firm’s post-tax profit for the first half of this year was even better. Monday’s report shows the firm made a total of HKD 10.43 million ($1.33 million) in the first half of this year. That was an approximately 238 percent increase on last years HKD 3.09 million ($390,000).