A growing trend towards multi-vendor outsourcing among UK corporates has helped boost Computacenter’s sales.
The European IT infrastructure services provider’s unaudited results for the six months ended 30 June 2010 revealed that adjusted profit before tax increased 16.6% to £21.3m (2009: £18m). Group revenues for the period increased by 5.4% to £1.29bn (compared with its 2009 sales of £1.22bn).
Mike Norris, chief executive of Computacenter (pictured), said, “The UK contract base over this term grew by 6.1% in H1 to £234.6m. We attribute our contract base improvement to a continued trend in multi-vendor outsourcing in the market. Due to customers wishing to retain control, whilst gaining flexibility through outsourcing solutions, there has been a larger degree of selectivity in identifying services suitable for outsourcing, as well as a multi-sourcing approach when choosing providers.”
He added that UK performance was “strong” compared to the same period in 2009, with adjusted operating profit growing by 43.7% to £18.1m.
Overall UK revenues for the period, excluding the disposal of the distribution business, were up by 12.7% to £651.9m. Services revenues grew by 8.0%, which was largely driven by growth in contractual services, mainly within the Financial Services environment. Product revenue increased by 14.6%, as customers continued to invest into new technologies.
“This widening of the outsourcing arena has given us increased opportunities to present our offerings to more customers and also provides better potential for supplier partnering,” he added.
“Computacenter made good progress in the first six months of 2010. The improvement in profitability in the period, was largely driven by a strong rebound in infrastructure spend, together with steady growth in services, as well as our continued focus on cost control.”
Greg Lock, the company’s chairman, said: “In a nutshell, our cost reductions, as well as our exit from markets which absorb working capital without delivering good yield, have resulted in the operational gearing we continue to see in these first-half results.”
He added that, behind the scenes, the company is implementing programmes designed to improve all aspects of its business on a sustainable basis: “We are taking group-wide actions to share best practices in our offerings, customer service and in the relentless drive to ensure our service delivery capabilities are of the highest quality.
“We are investing a very significant sum in the implementation of our new ERP system. The combined effect of these programmes is designed to create even more operational gearing and to accelerate our organic growth in higher margin activities.”
Source:http://www.procurementleaders.com/news/latestnews/3505-computacenter-helped-by-uk/
