IT reseller Computacenter (CCC) ticked up 0.8% to £24.74 as it confirmed a robust 12 months in a trading update.
The company lifted its guidance on full-year profit after the positive performance seen throughout 2020 continued right to the last, helped by acquisitions. This is the latest in a series of earnings upgrades for the group.
Revenue grew by 8%, 3% when the effect of the recent acquisitions made in November are excluded.
Adjusted pre-tax profit for the year is now expected to be in excess of £195 million. The company also saw a very strong level of net funds at £188 million as many customers paid up early, while margin performance was helped by a reduction in travel and more limited use of contractors.
POWERED BY PUBLIC SECTOR
The company benefited from sales to the public sector and firms in the services sector and while spending in manufacturing and the industrial space has dried up, management stated that ‘the positive momentum we have seen in trading since the start of the pandemic shows no sign of abating, and our pipelines for both technology sourcing and services are as strong as at any time we have seen in the last year’.
This reflects the need for many organisations to adapt to the digital shift accelerated by the coronavirus crisis. Computacenter has three areas of operation.
It supplies customers with the PC desktops, tablets, smartphones and other devices on pretty skinny profit margins.
It consults and advises clients on software and applications, and resells the right product for them from the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, Cisco and Symantec.
It also offers managed services, providing an entire outsourced IT solution, for businesses which don’t want to run their own in-house IT teams.
Final results for the year ended 31 December 2020 are scheduled for 16 March 2021.
