By Sabela Ojea

London Stock Exchange Group PLC reported Friday a nearly doubled pretax profit for the first half of 2021 and said that even though costs will increase in the second half as it continues integrating the acquisition of Refinitiv, it will still meet its financial targets.

The stock-exchange and financial-information company posted a pretax profit of 510 million pounds ($710.3 million) compared with GBP262 million for the same period a year earlier.

Revenue rose to GBP2.99 billion from GBP877 million for the year-earlier period.

The board declared an interim dividend of 25.0 pence a share, up from 23.3 pence a share for the same period in 2020.

Regarding the integration of Refinitiv, London Stock Exchange Group said it booked GBP77 million of run-rate cost synergies in the period, and that it has increased its full-year guidance for run-rate cost synergy delivery to GBP125 million from GBP88 million.

The London-listed company said it still expects to meet its full-year guidance of mid-single-digit growth, and around 5% on a constant-currency basis.

"We...are highly focused on continued execution to maintain the good momentum into the second half and future years. We are executing on a detailed integration and transformation plan to create a simplified and scalable business, and we are ahead of plan," the London-listed company said.

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

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 06, 2021 03:00 ET (07:00 GMT)

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