Bytes and Maintel share details of H1 progress

Bytes and Maintel have provided further evidence that those operating in growth markets have been able to weather the storm so far this year.

Bytes covers cloud, security and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI), and Maintel has been on a mission to tighten its focus to be a comms and security specialist. Both have shared numbers for the first half of the financial year that show the progress made so far.

Bytes Technology Group’s insight into its numbers for the six months to 31 August 2024 will reassure shareholders that the firm is getting through 2024 in good shape.

Without giving too much detail, Bytes indicated that gross invoiced income and adjusted operating profit growth was “comfortably in the double digits”, at around 13.5%, and gross profit growth was coming in at the 9% mark. The channel player also indicated its cash position was solid at the end of the first half, standing at £71.5m.

Sam Mudd, CEO of Bytes, said the firm was on track to have a good year and was benefiting from operating in the cloud and security spaces.

“We delivered a strong performance in the period and I am grateful to our teams for their efforts. We remain confident in our growth strategy and believe we are well positioned to benefit from the structural demand drivers we see in our markets, including cloud computing, cyber security and AI,” she said.

Elsewhere, managed service player Maintel has also issued its numbers for the six months to 30 June 2024.

Group revenue was in line with expectations, down by 1.8% at £46.6m, and recurring revenue climbed to 78.7% of total revenue, from 75.1% in the same period last year.

Maintel has been making the transition from being a communications generalist to a specialist in unified communications and collaboration, customer experience, security and connectivity. That has had some impact in product mix, but the business has continued to deliver growth, at 14.3%, which was slightly down from the first half of 2023.

“2024 is a critical year in the transformation of Maintel. Whilst the company is no longer benefiting from the delayed order backlog caused by the global semiconductor shortage that bolstered our results in 2023, we instead have the full benefit of the transformation and restructuring work completed in the first half of last year. It is now about consolidating, embedding and fine tuning the transformation, providing a springboard for the future,” said Dan Davies, interim CEO at Maintel.

“The continued execution of our generalist to specialist strategic pivot has been extremely encouraging, evidenced by key leading indicators such as a high percentage of pipeline and new wins in both our strategic segments and our target verticals, the increased quality of those new wins in both technology and margin terms, and increased customer experience scores,” he added.

“These leading indicators are now beginning to come to fruition. The first half performance saw underlying revenue growth, significant adjusted EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation] growth and enhanced adjusted EBITDA margins.”

Davies said the firm was cautiously optimistic about the second half of the year and expected further growth.

“Our enhanced professional and managed service product offering, including the strategic launch of our new Maintel Application Platform, remains laser focused on helping our customers embrace, thrive and progress in a digital and hybrid workplace, improve their customer experience, securely connect their people to their applications and their data, and protect their business from the ever-growing cyber threat,” he said.

“The services we provide our customers are vital to their organisations, their people, their customers and their communities, and we take this responsibility incredibly seriously,” Davies added.