Probrand sees revenue climb by nearly a quarter

Birmingham-based firm says its online marketplace has been key to the growth

Birmingham-based VAR Probrand saw revenue climb by almost a quarter in the first half of this year, driven by the launch of its online marketplace, the firm has claimed.

Probrand did not reveal the exact revenue for its H1, but said sales grew 22 per cent year on year.

In its last filing on Companies House, Probrand reported revenue of £41m for the year ending 31 December 2016.

Peter Robbins, CEO at Probrand, said: "Transformation is expensive, challenging and demands great people. With customers changing how they discover and buy, reflected in the rise of B2B marketplaces, we are halfway through our plan to remain relevant, and early results are very positive.

"Our platform is providing a materially different digital IP (intellectual property), delivering market differentiation, attracting new customers we otherwise would not have engaged and unlocking future scale-out into international geographies.

"We have rapidly grown our transactional base with integration into mainstream ERP systems and third-party communities, winning much larger run rate and contracted spend from bigger organisations."

Probrand has been going through its own transformation over recent times and in January last year merged with its cloud and managed services sister company Icomm.

The firm said its new its marketplace has made it the first VAR to "adopt a software-driven platform-based strategy" in the UK.

It claimed to have seen sales of cloud and managed services outgrow the overall business, at 25 per cent year on year, which has boosted its margin.

"This builds on the success of our in-house technical excellence and deployment," Robbins added.

"Of particular note are digital projects that are boosting profits and customer engagement for vendors and distributors.

"We now move to drive growth through exploiting the reach of our IP, scaling customer acquisition and onboarding more salespeople to our platform mentality."