Martin Hellawell says reseller will aim to add £70m to top line every year as he talks to CRN about Softcat's first year as a public company and growth plans
Your growth accelerated in the second half. Does that mean the referendum hasn't had any ill effects on your business?
I think net, net, that's probably true. In the two or three weeks leading up to Brexit we certainly saw decision making getting slower. Then Brexit happened and very quickly people realised that pricing was going to go up, so actually it had a bit of a stimulus on sales for a few weeks as people were getting orders in quickly before prices went up. Then we went through the summer period, where people thought 'actually, the world hasn't collapsed; this isn't quite as bad as we thought it would be'. And in the last four or five weeks, it's felt a bit more 'oh, this could get trickier again'. So we've gone through different waves. But no matter how bad the economy gets, we still think we can grow the business.
Sterling has crashed against the dollar again since the last round of vendor price rises in the summer. You sell a lot of hardware. How concerned are you that there will be a second wave of price rises from the likes of HP, Dell or Lenovo?
We are not overly concerned. Customers know what's going on with the currency markets, so they expect prices to go up and they expect us to pass on those price increases to them. Our margins are maintained, so it doesn't actually directly affect us. They might sacrifice some of the luxury items but the amount of available spend they have and the amount of available margins for us stay constant.
Are you expecting UK vendor prices to go up again?
Honestly, I don't know, and it doesn't really affect us, but probably, yes.
Click through to the next page to find out the two negatives of life as a public company, according to Hellawell
