Softcat CEO on growth drivers, expansion, and coronavirus impact

Graeme Watt talks through Softcat's H1 results and how COVID-19 is affecting customer buying habits

You've reported another quarter of strong growth. Are there any areas you'd highlight as key contributors?

It was pleasing to be able to grow at around 20 per cent year over year; we think that is two or three times the market growth so we believe we're still taking share.

Momentum continues from previous periods, and in that sense I mean that the growth was very broad based and covered most of the technologies and customer segments.

We don't have dependencies on particular pieces of business and our incremental performance in H1 was wasn't dependent on any particular area of the business, which is pleasing.

If I had to pick another highlight it would be the continuing growth we see in GP per customer. Not only did we grow our new customers by 4.2 per cent, we also grew GP per customer.

You mentioned in your earnings call that you've seen an increase in demand in some areas because of the coronavirus. Where are you seeing this?

It's more on the corporate side than the public sector side, but it's mainly laptops.

There is some growing interest in collaboration tools, both the applications that we sell and some of the hardware - AV and videoconferencing solutions - but that is a longer sales cycle so we won't see that take hold now.

You could argue that there is definitely a temporary interest in those collaboration tools and that it could become quite long term as well.

We are helping our customers deal with those needs as far as we can. On laptops it is a little bit more challenging because everyone is after them.

One of the ways we can add value is to make sure we can secure supply ahead of our competition and make sure it is what our customer wants and needs, and we're doing that quite successfully.

But that is a spike because demand is already outstripping supply and one of the impacts of COVID-19 is that we will have some sort of impact on hardware supply chain, so it's a short-term spike.

What are you hearing from vendors and distributors with regards to supply chain hindrances?

I don't think they fully know themselves. One of the things some of our vendors did was distribute their assembly so it wasn't all focused in China. But now COVID-19 has spread, I'm speculating that they may actually need to move some of that assembly back into China as it recovers.

So they're doing what they can, but there will be some disruption on some high-demand technologies in the coming weeks and we will manage our way through it.

Can you talk through the rationale behind the new Netherlands presence, and do you expect further expansion in the future?

The Netherlands one will be another operational hub that will help us work with enterprise customers in the UK who have needs in the Netherlands and other markets. It will also help us partner with other resellers in the US that have customers with needs in Europe. In the same way that we use partnerships across the globe, we are used as a partner for other entities.

In terms of further regional offices I would say that we have no plans at this point, but that could easily change.

You could probably argue that we have filled all the major geographic gaps in the UK, but there are still places like Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Belfast and Cardiff - cities of interest that are pretty well served by other regional offices in our network that we could move to satellite operations. But that is just speculation at this point. We don't have another UK regional office in the pipeline.

Some of the biggest events in the channel calendar have been cancelled or postponed. As a partner, does this have a negative effect?

One benefit is content, and I think most of them are moving to some virtual conferencing so that we can get the content, so they're trying to retain that as best they can.

You don't have to be in a room in Vegas to get the content, I can be sitting in a comfortable office in London.

I think it's the networking piece that you miss. It's a great opportunity to network with peers and understand their challenges and opportunities.

The global conferences are a good chance to get in front of global technology chiefs at our vendors and that is the bit that goes away when these events are cancelled. You definitely lose something.