Investors holding shares in LST on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) got their first look at Light Science Technologies interims for the six months ended 31 May 2025 on 13 August 2025, with the shares sitting at 1.45p, more than 9% below the 2.3p level at which the company last attracted wider attention in May.
The headline numbers are not a disaster, but they are not a catalyst either. Group revenue came in at £5.1m, fractionally below the £5.2m recorded in the same period a year earlier. The more interesting story sits inside the divisional breakdown.
What the Light Science Technologies Interims Actually Show
The Passive Fire Protection (PFP) division, which makes products that resist the spread of fire in buildings, posted revenues of £1.0m for the period, up from £0.3m in H1 2024. Gross margins in PFP expanded sharply, reaching 64.3% against 41.2% a year earlier. That is a genuine step forward: the division is small but moving in the right direction on both scale and profitability.
AgTech (the company’s agricultural technology arm, focused on controlled-environment crop growing) grew revenues to £0.5m from £0.4m, with gross margins of 42.0%.
The problem is CEM, the contract electronics manufacturing division that remains LST’s largest business. CEM revenues fell to £3.6m from £4.5m in H1 2024, a £0.9m decline that swamped the gains elsewhere. Gross margins in CEM improved to 27.8% from 23.7%, which shows better execution, but lower revenues mean less cash generated overall.
Taken together, the group gross margin widened to 36.3% from a lower base in the prior year period. That is a structurally better margin profile. But it arrived alongside flat-to-lower overall revenues, which is the tension the share price is pricing in.
Chief executive Simon Deacon said in the interim results: ‘This was another period of positive progress as we continued to target high margin opportunities across our divisions, underpinning strong gross margin growth. Combined with a growing Group quoted sales pipeline and continued overhead cost control, we are increasingly well positioned for the future.’
That framing of confidence sits alongside the company’s own admission of uncertainty over the level and timing of revenues, a qualification that tends to cut through boardroom optimism for investors trying to model when the business will consistently generate cash.
Context from the Full Year and What Came Next
To understand why the bar is set where it is, the full year ended 30 November 2024 matters. LST reported record revenues of £12.04m for that year, a 29.5% increase on the prior year, with a near-breakeven loss before tax of £0.03m and positive operating cash flow of £1.53m, according to the FY2024 final results. Cash and undrawn facilities stood at £1.87m at that year-end. That full-year performance set expectations for continued momentum into 2025.
The day after the interims, LST announced further CEM contract wins worth approximately £0.5m via a regulatory news service announcement on 14 August 2025. Contract announcements of this size are meaningful for a business of LST’s scale, though the CEM revenue decline in H1 illustrates that pipeline and booked revenue can diverge in timing.
For holders wanting to understand the shareholder base, CEO Simon Deacon holds 96,203,613 shares (9.69% of the company), according to the LST investor relations page. The largest single holder is the Beaumont-Dark Family Office with 15.11%, followed by Dowgate Group and Onward Opportunities Limited with 13.92%. Significant insider and institutional ownership can signal alignment with shareholders, but it also concentrates selling risk if any major holder exits.
Looking further forward, Yahoo Finance reporting on H1 2026 (the six months to 31 May 2026, one full year after the period covered by these interims) suggests the trading environment became harder before it improved. Revenue in that later period fell to £3.7m from the £5.1m posted in H1 2025, with Building Safety Regulator blockages weighing on PFP and a major CEM customer reaching end-of-life on a product. Post-period, over £2.1m of revenue was reportedly booked in June and July 2026 alone, representing 58% of that depressed H1 figure in just two months, with a committed forward order book of over £3m and 80% of that expected in the second half.
That pattern of a weak first half followed by a heavily back-end-loaded order book is not new for LST. It is precisely the tension the original H1 2025 interims capture: margin progress is real, but the timing of when revenues actually convert remains the variable that the share price, sitting at 1.45p, has not yet been persuaded is under control. The second-half delivery in PFP will be the moment of truth.
