At the end of the period, the company’s cash in hand decreased to 92.1m pounds ($148.3m) from 109.7m pounds ($176.6m) in 2001. The bottom line was helped by restructuring during the year, which involved 230 jobs being lost in the UK, its largest market where revenue declined 9% to 1.59bn pounds ($2.56bn).
The second largest operation, France, grew 20% to 316.7m pounds ($509.9m), while Belgium and Luxembourg declined 12% to 12.6m pounds ($20.3m). Its German arm did not produce revenue for the group during the year due to Computacenter selling off the operation in October 2001 to GE Capital IT Solutions (GECITS), after it made revenue of 62.6m pounds ($100.8m) in 2001. At the same time however, Computacenter acquired the French and UK reseller operations of GECITS for 2m pounds ($3.22m).
In November 2002, Computacenter also acquired new German and Austrian operations through its purchase of GE Compunet for a potential 121m euros ($194.8m), through which it took on a workforce of 4,250 in Germany and Austria, where its client base includes companies in the manufacturing, retail and financial services sectors. Computacenter paid an initial 57m euros ($57m) plus a potential earn-out of 64m euros ($64m) depending on the company reaching certain financial targets in the next two years. The deal was completed in early 2003. GE CompuNet established Computacenter as the largest specialist VAR in Europe, with additional revenue of 1.24bn euros ($1.92bn), of which 25% comes from IT services.
The slowdown in Computacenter’s core hardware reselling activities were offset to some degree by the strong demand within managed services, which grew 16%, and professional services, which grew 13% during the year, helped by the company winning a major desktop services deal with BT Group across 100,000 seats.
Commenting on the outlook, chairman Ron Sandler said: While it is too early to predict performance in 2003, we believe that Computacenter is well positioned to produce profit growth over 2002.
Source: Computerwire
