Concorde glides into £10m club

Buy-and-build services outfit posts eight-figure sales in FY11

Buy-and-build services player Concorde IT Group is celebrating hitting the £10m mark as it considers ramping up its acquisition activity again.

For the year to the end of December 2011, the Leeds-based firm has indicated it grew revenue more than 50 per cent to £10m, with operating profit coming in at £300,000, more than double last year's figure. Annuity services revenue was reportedly up 40 per cent.

The company made a string of acquisitions following a management buyout in 2009, but curtailed its consolidation activity last year as it integrated the businesses bought in the previous years.

But Concorde was back on the acquisition trail earlier this year with its purchase of Kettering-based Enigma Computer Services. The buy-and-builder has indicated that it is currently weighing up a handful of further buyout opportunities.

Concorde chief executive Colin Meakin claimed that investments made last year, in upgrading management and CRM systems, and building a virtualised architecture to support a new cloud computing offering, would stand the company in good stead.

"We have made tremendous progress in 2011 in realising our ambitions to grow the company into a truly nationwide, full IT services company," he said. "Our outstanding figures clearly show that we are bucking the trend of the slack growth in the UK economy. By reinvesting in the business we are ensuring that we have the infrastructure capable of effectively absorbing more acquisitions.

"We have made solid progress in acquiring new customers and increasing our revenue from our existing customer base. By divesting ourselves of our non-core activities we are able to concentrate ourselves fully on expanding our service portfolio."