Edinburgh-based Miller Group has announced it returned to profit last year.

The company is one of Scotland's largest building firms.

It said its pre-tax profit for 2012 was £6.6m, after recording a loss of £30.4m the previous year.

Group profit before interest was £29.2m, around a 40% increase of the £20.8m it posted for 2011. Revenue also increased by £32.3m to reach £619.9m with the firm reporting net assets of £236.5m.

Miller Group has a total of four divisions, in housing, construction, property and mining. Each sector recorded profits.


Total housing sales increased by 5% to 1,831 units with the average selling price rising by £9k, to £170,000.

The construction division had a record order book of £1.5bn, while its property business was said to have made good progress in developing its asset holdings in Scotland, the north west of England and Birmingham through a variety of lettings and forward sales.

Lastly, the company's joint mining venture has now extracted 33% of coal from Ffos-y-fran in South Wales.

It has 7.3 million tonnes of coal reserves still to extract.

Speaking to BBC Scotland, chief executive Keith Miller said the results were "very good".

He added: "It's been a good year - we've moved forward very positively across all four of our businesses and we've got a very good platform on which to build going forward."

In February 2012, Miller Group completed a major refinance that attracted £160m in new equity.

(JP)