Top 100 UK resellers grow revenue 8.5 per cent to £17bn

Just £60m separates the top two in this year's rundown of the top resellers and MSPs by revenue

Doug Woodburn
@DougWoodburn
02 December 2020

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The UK's top 100 resellers clawed in collective revenue of nearly £17bn in their latest financial years on record - an 8.5 per cent leap.

That's the headline finding of Top VARs 2020, which ranks and profiles the top 100 UK resellers, MSPs and other front-line channel partners on our radar.

You can view the report in full here, or the individual profiles here.

Top VARs - which we have compiled in association with Comms-care - is based largely on the latest annual accounts filed by each firm on Companies House, many of which covered a period that ended before the pandemic began.

Although interim results divulged by publicly listed resellers this year have been more mixed, the 100 firms featured in Top VARs enjoyed another strong year when looking at their last full years on record.

Together, the top 100 turned over £16.96bn - that's more than the GDP of Botswana and equal to what the government has spent on PPE and other Covid-related goods and services since April. Combined headcount of over 42,000 means they employ more staff than the population of ancient Egyptian city Thebes in its pomp, meanwhile.

While down on the 13.2 per cent growth seen in 2019, the 8.5 per cent year on year revenue uplift is well above both GDP and general IT market growth.

Their bottom lines also held up, with average median net profit margins roughly flat at 1.95 per cent.

This year, the race for top spot heated up, with just £60m - or just one large deal - separating Computacenter and Softcat.

The revenue threshold for Top VARs rose fractionally this year to £42.8m, with new entrants including Solutionize Global setting the report alight with their treble-digit growth (see p10).

While the pandemic has meant slow growth - or even no growth - is temporarily the norm (see p9), recent events have also cemented the role resellers and MSPs play.

According to the end user survey that accompanies the report (see p29), 36 per cent of IT decision makers told us that events of this year have had a positive impact on how they see their IT providers, compared with just 19 per cent who said it has had a negative effect.

VIEW TOP VARS 2020 HERE