Sergey Nivens - Fotolia
Softcat finishing its fiscal year strongly
The channel player has provided a Q3 update that indicates it will finish the year ahead of expectations
Softcat has indicated that it expects this financial year will come in ahead of expectations giving the financial markets some much needed cheer on a morning dominated by poor results from retailer Marks & Spencer.
The reseller issued an update for its third quarter, which finished on 20 April, with all segments of the business delivering growth.
The firm saw no reason why those conditions would change and commented on both the market conditions and customer demand remaining strong pointing to a decent fiscal Q4.
“The Company has continued to trade well across all segments during the Period, maintaining momentum from the first half and reflecting further successful execution of its strategy. Market conditions and customer demand have both remained strong. The Board is confident that the Company will deliver full year results that are ahead of expectations,” the update stated.
Providing some commentary on the numbers for the first time in his role as Softcat CEO Graeme Watt got the chance to provide some more colour around what was happening in the business.
"We continue to hit our goals across the business. We've achieved this through our high energy focus on winning new customers and selling more of our technology and services portfolio to existing customers," he said.
"This simple strategy is serving us well and we still have considerable market share opportunity," he added.
Watt took up his role, succeeding Martin Hellawell, at the start of April and stated that his immediate priorities were to spend time with staff and customers getting to know the business in more depth.
The markets liked what they heard and the firm’s share price rose by 8.5% this morning on the back of the Q3 trading update making it the highest rising stock on the FTSE 250.
In the half year results the firm indicated that within the next year it intended opening an office in Dublin to widen its reach, building on recent moves to expand the Manchester office and bolster activities in the South coast area.
