Maintel strategy underpins progress made in H1

Managed services player Maintel has shared numbers for the six months ended 30 June, with the results falling in line with expectations.

The business, which has been transitioning from being a comms generalist to a specialist that concentrates on unified comms, customer experience and security, issued a trading update covering its first half.

That change in strategy has inevitably impacted on financial performance, with revenues of £46.6m a 1.8% on the previous year’s performance. EBITDA grew by 28.2% to £4.8m as the strategy began to deliver and it sealed some contract wins. The firm indicated it was already benefiting from a streamlined structure and price increases.

Maintel also used H1 to get a tighter grip on the finances, reducing net cash debt to £15.6m, compared to £21.4m a year earlier.

The expectation is that the new contract wins will help the business in the second half, as some of those multi-year deals start to kick in. The business has also been able to counter inflationary pressures with the restructuring efforts, and the business will continue to focus on cost control over the rest of the fiscal year.

Maintel has been actively investing in its strategy and has been forming partnerships to ensure it has the depth against its target areas of unified comms, CX and security.

Earlier this summer, the firm partnered with Datatrack to launch its unified comms (UC) analytics offering.

“The importance of bringing data together from siloed platforms is now more important than ever,” stated Dan Davies, interim CEO and CTO at Maintel, back in June.

“With data-driven decisions now a top priority for many organisations, it’s clear that the ability to glean meaningful insights from volumes of data is no longer a competitive advantage, but a core requirement for making real-time business decisions.”

On the security front, the firm launched an application platform, with secure call recording exporting service Audiosafe being the first offering.

Speaking back in March, Davies said the platform would help the firm to “tightly integrate cloud communication and customer experience platforms into our customer’s own business applications and workflows, providing a library of reusable pre-built software components developed in a leading edge, secure, serverless microservices architecture from the public cloud.”

Maintel is not alone in looking to pursue a strategy that drives the business towards higher margins and streamlines operations, with K3 another example of a channel player in transition. The shared theme is to keep an eye on costs as the businesses pivot in a more profitable direction.