Bytes sales hit £120m in H1 after Brexit vote had 'no impact whatsoever'

New offices and new staff on the horizon for Bytes

Bytes has smashed the £120m sales barrier in the first half of the year and is looking to open new offices and welcome extra staff as a result.

For the six months to 31 August, UK sales at Bytes hit £120m, up 22 per cent compared with a year ago. Of that figure, around £9m came from services, an amount which was up by around 50 per cent over the same period.

Operating net profits for the first half reached £5.1m, up 21 per cent compared with last year. Revenue at most of Bytes' key vendors - Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, VMware and Check Point - all rose at around the 20 per cent mark, with only its Citrix business remaining flat. Bytes' managing director Neil Murphy told CRN that the company is looking to improve the Citrix business as a result.

During Bytes' H1, the UK voted to leave the EU. Murphy said that the decision had "no impact whatsoever", but admitted this came as a surprise to him.

"It's hardly been noticeable," he said. "We transact 2,000 to 3,000 orders a month and we probably had one or two customers who said they would delay and see what happens. It was literally just that and I was amazed."

Bytes has hired 20 new sales staff over the last six months, and plans to recruit another 40 to 50 before the end of its fiscal year, taking headcount to 300. Some of the new recruits will be based in new offices, such as a Watford base which is being planned at the moment. Comparex's former boss Mike Chambers will run the new office when it opens this month.

Murphy said the move to cloud has fuelled Bytes' growth in the first half, which has been seen across all its key vendors.

"Obviously we have invested significantly in our cloud pre-sales capability and a lot of our new wins are around the ability to help customers transition from on-premise to off-premise," he said. "That's a big differentiator for us this year and there will be more of that.

"We've always wanted to lessen our reliance on Microsoft and if I go back five years, Microsoft was 90 per cent of our business. Now it is still the largest part, at about 60 per cent. I'm quite happy with that mix and I still want Microsoft to be the largest. But everything has grown at the same time and the same rate."