Bits and Splits - stock.adobe.co
Bytes H1 numbers show benefits of software and services strategy
Channel player shares results for its first half, revealing a decline in hardware but improvements in other parts of the portfolio
Bytes Technology Group has reported a solid set of numbers for its first half, managing to take a greater share of wallet despite a tough economic climate.
The channel player reported a 13.7% increase in invoiced income to £1,230.2m for the six months ended 31 August. Profit rose by 9% to £82.1m, with operating profit climbing by 16.3% to £35.6m.
Software sales were attributed as helping the income improve, but the business also benefitted from increasing its share of wallet with existing customers and expanding its client base.
Revenue dropped by 2.9% to £105.5m from £108.7m in the same period last year, which was largely because of sizeable declines in hardware, down by 48.1% year-on-year.
Sam Mudd, CEO of Bytes Technology Group, said it continued to benefit from demand for its range of software, solutions and services.
“Despite the challenging economic climate and political uncertainty over the past six months, we have increased our share of wallet amongst our existing customers as they continued to invest in their IT needs,” she said. “We have also expanded our client base in both the public and corporate sectors.
“The Group has again made strategic investments in personnel, internal systems and new vendor accreditations to drive future growth, and support our customers in navigating the complexities of agile, yet secure, IT environments,” said Mudd. “Our strong relationships with Microsoft and other top-tier vendors allow us to seize exciting opportunities in cloud adoption, workload migrations, storage, security and virtualisation technologies.”
Software and internal services
The two growth areas across the business were software and internal services, which grew by 11.3% and 28.1% respectively.
Mudd said there were also opportunities emerging as a result of AI and Microsoft’s activity around pushing Copilot.
Bytes revealed it had sold 130,000 of Microsoft’s Copilot for M365 licenses since its launch in the second half of its ’24 fiscal year, and was planning to extend its in-house artificial intelligence (AI) team to support further growth and the offerings from its other vendors.
“We continue to collaborate with our customers to enable their teams to roll out the use of emerging AI technology, such as Copilot,” she said. “With sustained demand in all these areas, and our expanding technical capabilities, these will be our key focus areas in the remainder of FY25 and beyond.”
Mudd has consistently talked of the opportunities that the business can tap into as a result of focusing on software and services, and indicated that focusing on those areas with a staff that could provide skilled expertise was its main source of differentiation.
It expects to build on H1 and take that momentum into the second half.
