An identity technology company has been urged to "be boring for a while" as analysts encouraged investors to buy up its shares.
Panmure Gordon made the call after Chester-headquartered GB Group revealed it had slumped to a loss of almost £120m during its latest financial year.
The business said its result was due to an annual impairment review which resulted in a £122.2m charge against its identity business, which is formed of its IDology and Acuant acquisitions.
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In its prior financial year, GB Group had achieved a pre-tax profit of £21.7m.
In a note to investors, Alasdair Young of Panmure Gordon said the results were "very much in line with (reduced) expectations".
After the annual figures were announced, GB Group's share price dropped from 286p to 251p before starting to rebound the following day.
The company has a market capitalisation of over £600m but its share price has fallen almost 15% so far in 2023 and by over 45% over the last 12 months.
Panmure Gordon added: "More positively, customer retention rates remain unchanged and revenue contributions from new logos were higher than normal - suggesting that contrary to market concerns, the business does not believe it is losing market share.
"The slowdown is a function of net retention, as clients saw lower volumes across their own customer bases.
"As suggested by the positive initial reaction to April's trading update, we think the business simply needs to report that things have stopped getting worse to trigger a re-rating."
It added: "Notwithstanding a poor year and overpaying for Acuant at the top of the tech cycle, we believe GB Group remains one of the highest quality UK technology stocks.
"Based on the assumption that the business is not losing market share to competitors, we remain staunch buyers with the shares at five-year lows."
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