Pan-European IT services group Computacenter has issued a positive trading statement to the market covering the pandemic, and has taken its UK staff off the government furlough scheme.
The statement is based on unaudited financial information for the four months to 30 April 2020, so it accounts for the main business effects of Covid-19 on its main trading area of Western Europe. Computacenter said: “We stated in our [previous] trading statement on 23 April 2020 that current trading was more robust than we had anticipated at the start of the crisis. Since that date, business has accelerated further and we have managed to secure some substantial Technology Sourcing contracts due to our ability to scale our operations to meet the demand.”
It added: “These incremental volumes mean that we now believe that the first half of 2020 will be considerably ahead of the same period of last year. While things are a little clearer, continuing uncertainty in the market is such that the board believes that it is still unable to provide meaningful guidance at this time concerning the second half of the year due to the Covid-19 crisis.”
Industry analyst house TechMarketView reports that Computacenter has taken its UK staff off the the UK government furlough scheme in response to improved market conditions. Computacenter CEO Mike Norris (pictured) told them that the business had used it for only one month, and had now come off it as the company had “found business to be more resilient than expected”.
“Norris also emphasised his view that the furlough scheme was incredibly good having helped many businesses in the UK,” said TechMarketView.
The company had been using government furlough schemes in other countries. It's not known at this stage whether other Computacenter staff are still on those. In its trading statement last month, for the first quarter ended 31 March 2020, the company said it had laid off 10% of its staff under furlough.
Computacenter employs over 16,000 staff, so at least 1,500 were perhaps originally laid off across international operations. The company previously said it will not pay a dividend for the year ending 31 December 2019.
The next scheduled trading update is the unveiling of the company's interim results on Wednesday 9 September 2020, but the company said it would update trading guidance “as soon as we have more visibility on expected trading conditions for the second half of the year”.
