It has been an eventful year for the Sir Peter Rigby-owned resale powerhouse, but at the end of it SCC appears on our list exactly where it was last year.
However, its proximity to the leader has increased dramatically, and the £650m gap of last year has been reduced by almost a third. SCC’s annual accounts for the year to 31 March 2012 show that turnover spiked 13.6 per cent to £642.5m. Operating profit stood at £10m – up from just £3.6m in FY11.
Operational margins for the most recently closed year were a fairly modest 1.55 per cent, but were more than double the 0.64 per cent profitability recorded in the prior year. The remainder of this year’s turnover figure comes from infrastructure VAR Kavanagh, which the Birmingham-based giant acquired in September 2010.
SCC’s operations in the public sector were frequently in the headlines this year. Last year the West Midlands Police criticised the firm’s pricing through its exclusive commodity and hardware software supply deal with police forces in England and Wales. But the force very quickly retracted its criticisms.
There was more good news for SCC this summer when policing minister Nick Herbert indicated that he wanted to reduce the use of sub-suppliers for tablet PCs, claiming that working through a single supplier has already saved the force money.
This year SCC also landed on the G-Cloud framework and has already secured some business through the deal. And now the reseller will have the sole focus of its parent SCH, after a deal to sell distribution business SDG was agreed two months ago.
