Computacenter has reported an 8% increase in annual sales for the year ended 31 December, along with a 37% jump in adjusted pre-tax profits.
Sales went up to £5.4bn, with the firm's services sales increasing 2.5% overall to £1.26bn. The adjusted pre-tax group profit was £200m.
The UK saw an increase in revenues of 11% as technology sourcing (reselling) revenues “surged” to cope with the demand generated by the Covid-19 crisis, said Computacenter. The adjusted operating profit in the UK jumped 40.2% overall.
Computacenter has so far been awarded £198 million worth of contracts by the government, but some contracts have come under scrutiny after being awarded without an open tender process.
Germany experienced an overall revenues decline by 2.5%, with falls in managed services and technology sourcing partially offset by “another strong performance” in professional services. The adjusted operating profit in Germany increased 38.1%.
France “had a difficult year”, said the company, being more impacted by a slow-down of its large industrial customer base and a switch to “lower margin workplace product”. There was also a downturn in services business, but the French operation still reported an adjusted operating profit up 27.3%.
North America had a “weaker than expected year” with a reduction in activity among its higher-margin mid-market customer base, which resulted in slightly declining revenues overall in constant currency. The Pivot acquisition added $292.7m of revenue and $6.8m of adjusted operating profit in the last two months of the year. Mike Norris (pictured), chief executive of Computacenter, said: “We have come into 2021 with solid momentum and have experienced a very positive start to the year.
“Growth rates are obviously difficult to predict as our geographies will come out of lockdown at different times, but our experiences of the last 12 months has convinced us more than ever that our customers will continue to invest in IT and will require the services of Computacenter to enable them to do so.”
