A rather cushy £34 million software licensing deal helped Computacenter record a 23 percent year-on-year leap in first quarter revenues.
Computacenter announced that its Q1 performance beat expectations, particularly around its supply chain (product supply) business.
“This leads the Board to believe that 2018 is likely to be a year of further progress for
in profitability as well as earnings per share”, it said.
It was the UK which helped Computacenter do so well. This was partly due to a one-off, £34 million software licence sale with an unnamed customer.
Even without that, UK growth was up 21 percent, with its supply chain up 52 percent and services down by seven percent.
That beats the 19 per cent growth recorded by Computacenter’s larger German arm. The outfit’s French revenues were flatter than crepes.
From a group perspective, supply chain revenues rose by 27 percent, a business Computacenter said had benefited from its customers’ drive to digitalise their business.
Services sales, which grew just two percent in Q1, are coming under savage pricing pressure; however, Computacenter added.
“We are responding to our customers’ desire to take cost out of long-term support contracts by increasing the competitiveness of our services offerings through productivity improvements which protect our profitability. However, this market trend does put corresponding pressure on our services top line growth which is currently being more than compensated by the supply chain performance.”
