Maintel makes a loss in H1, but sales soar

Unified comms provider Maintel has reported a £696,000 loss for first half of this year after seeing "slower than expected" business.

The loss for the six months ending 30 June 2016 comes after a profit of £2m in the same period last year.

Revenue, however, was up 54 per cent year on year to £38.1m over the same period.

CEO Eddie Buxton said the loss was a result of four "large contracts" taking longer than expected to complete, but highlighted the Azzurri acquisition as the main positive to take from the first half of the year.

"The highlight of the period was the acquisition of Azzurri, which was transformational for Maintel, adding significantly to our offering both in terms of products and services, specifically in the highly profitable growth areas of managed and cloud-based services, and also its highly complementary customer base," he said.

"Excluding Azzurri, trading in the underlying Maintel business was slower than expected due to delays in the timing of four large contracts. All of these contracts closed successfully at the end of Q2 2016 and as such we enter the second half with a strong order book as well as a full pipeline of opportunities.

"Our growth prospects remain positive and we are confident of delivering a profit performance for the year in line with market expectations."

As a result of the Azzurri acquisition, Maintel has opted to reduce its presence in the small business space, leading to the closure of Azzurri's small business mobile operation in East Kilbride.

This has led to "a number of redundancies" across the group, with the cost of these standing at around £300,000.

The network services division of the firm saw a 173 per cent increase in revenue to £11.7m, while revenue from the managed services and technology division increased 24 per cent to £23.8m.

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