Computacenter shares jumped on Tuesday after reporting a surge in first-half profit and raising its full-year guidance, as booming demand for the kit behind AI data centres drove record results at the newly promoted FTSE 100 group.
The company is one of a small cohort of London-listed companies that have grabbed the AI boom by the scruff of the neck and meaningfully boosted earnings.
Computacenter said revenue jumped 72% to £6.85bn in the six months to 30 June, with adjusted pre-tax profit up 87% to £152.4m. The growth was led by its Technology Sourcing business, which sources and deploys IT hardware at scale, as hyperscale, “neocloud” and enterprise customers poured money into data-centre and AI infrastructure. Adjusted earnings per share nearly doubled, and the interim dividend was raised 15% to 27.1p.
North America was, of course, the key driver of growth, with operating profit there more than doubling to account for 62% of the group total, up from 44% a year earlier.
The UK also accelerated sharply, while Germany delivered a robust underlying performance despite a dip in profit from earlier-than-expected efficiency costs. During the period, Computacenter completed two US acquisitions, AgreeYa and GAI, the latter opening up the US federal government market, and was promoted to the FTSE 100 in June.
One consequence of the shift towards high-volume hardware sales was a lower gross margin, which fell to 9.6% from 12.6%. But the scale of the growth left the group with a record committed order backlog of £9.3bn, more than four times the level of a year earlier.
Computacenter said it now expects full-year adjusted pre-tax profit of at least £380m, significantly ahead of the roughly £341m analysts had forecast.
Computacenter shares, already nearly 100% higher year-to-date, added another 3% following results.