Bytes Technology Group plc

Good morning. I'd like to thank you for joining us for Byte's half-year results presentation for the period ending August 31, 2023. Before we start, just a few words on this morning's session and the order of events. Andrew, our CFO, and I will provide a short presentation lasting around 20 minutes or so, and then we'll turn to live Q&A. We are delighted to present another strong set of financial results with double-digit growth driven by contributions from all areas of the business. While the economic backdrop remains mixed, we've continued to see strong demand from our corporate and public sector customers. I want to thank our people and our partners who have worked together so well to deliver solutions for our customers. We are delighted that our customer and staff satisfaction levels continue to be amongst the best in the industry. Now let's turn to our key financial headlines for the first half. As I said a moment ago, we've delivered another strong set of sales and profit growth, extending our track record of positive progress in both the top and bottom lines. Grossed Invoiced Income or Sales are up at almost 38% at just over £1 billion. This marks the first time that the company has surpassed the £1 billion mark in a six-month period. This exceptional level of growth was underpinned by some large strategically important contract wins and I'll talk a bit more about these later in our presentation. Looking at some of the other core metrics Gross profits are up by 15% to 75.3 million. This has been driven by higher sales and by an increase in gross profit per customer. Adjusted operating profit is up 13.8% to 33.9 million. This reflects strong demand for software, services and hardware from both our public and private sector clients. And this is all clear evidence that we are continuing to grow our market share here in the UK and Ireland. Reporting revenue under IFRS 15 shows a revenue increase of 16.3% for the period. We also grew earnings per share by 17% to 10.6 pence. Our AOP GP conversion rate remains industry leading and ended the half at 45%. This is ahead of our target of no less than 40%. And we plan for this to be at or near 43% for the full year as we continue to invest in new heads to ensure future growth by increasing our scale and reach. Now turning to cash conversion. Half-year cash conversion of 48.7% is in line with our historical performances and long-term expectations. This reflects the seasonal timings of cash flows and our normal weighting to a much higher conversion in the second half. Our rolling cash conversion for the year ended 31st August 2023 stood at 107% and reflects our five-year average performance in excess of 100%. We have finished the half with a cash balance of £51.7 million after having paid out £30 million in dividends and having made a £3 million investment in CloudBridge, the AWS solutions business. Now let's turn to the key ingredients of our successful first half and touch upon some of the work we've done to prepare for H2 and beyond. We've all said our culture and people are the secret source of our business formula. This continues to be true. Winning best places to work awards and having high levels of staff satisfaction demonstrate our focus in this important area. We're very pleased with our low employee churn levels while we continue to boost our headcount to support future growth. Headcount has increased 10% in the first half and we now have more than 1,000 employees. Although only six months have passed since it opened, we're delighted with the progress of our new sales office in the City of London, supporting existing clients and targeting new clients in the square mile. Some companies owe their success to a handful of major clients. Not so at Bytes. With thousands of customers and no client contributing more than 1% of our overall gross profits, we've established a well-balanced and diverse range of clients giving us a very resilient source of income. A key KPI for us is to grow gross profit per customer, and I'm delighted to report an increase of 10%, growing from £14,800 to £16,300 per customer in the first half. Our strategic relationships with the world's biggest and most successful IT companies is another key part of our business model. Our most important partner is Microsoft, and I'm pleased to say as our relationship has deepened as diverse as ever. After more than 30 years of working together, we both continue to invest in the tremendous opportunities we both see in our existing markets. With over 200 Microsoft certified professionals, we're excited about the announcements of forthcoming AI products in the form of Microsoft Copilot. These new tools should radically improve productivity and increase innovation. Our role as a multi-vendor reseller provides our customers with a leading selection of technology solutions to meet their specific needs. Our relationships with world-class vendors such as Adobe, AWS, IBM, CrowdStrike, Darktrace, Checkpoint, and Palo Alto, to name but a few, enable us to offer a diverse and dynamic set of solutions in an ever-changing environment. We remain focused on cloud computing, software as a service, hybrid data centers, and cybersecurity, which are all areas enjoying good growth. This gives us a high degree of confidence in our ability to continue our multi-year track record of growth. Now let us turn to customers. The diversity, depth, and breadth of client type gives our business great resilience, especially at times of uncertainty. These relationships are underpinned by the vertical knowledge of our sales teams and a laser focus on customer care. Whether we are delivering our own IP in the form of licensed dashboard to IKEA, a long-standing customer for the last eight years, or implementing cloud solutions to one of the universities shown on the slide, we engage knowing that the customer experience is key to their organization and to our future opportunity. As our customers face into an increasingly competitive environment, we believe IT will become an even greater competitive advantage in the years ahead. With cybersecurity threats increasing and the security of data becoming more heavily regulated by the authorities, We believe IT spend in those areas will continue to grow at pace. We will continue to expand our relevance to clients who need support and assurance as they seek to strengthen their own IT resilience and security. Our focus on cross-selling and up-selling into existing clients has allowed us to grow GP per customer by 10% so far this year. With 200 new customers in the first six months of the year, we have a strong pipeline to continue executing this strategy in the years ahead. As many of you will know, Bytes has a very high customer retention rate and enjoys a high level of repeat business. Our renewal rate for the half stands at 113% and 98% of business came from existing customers. This was 1% up on the corresponding period last year. This follows our normal trading pattern and should reduce to the lower 90s as we work through the year and new business becomes a bigger component of overall sales. Before we go on to the financials, I'd like to spend a bit of time on our most important single partnership, Microsoft. As I've said previously, there is no doubting the continued importance and benefit of a strong relationship with Microsoft. We first partnered with them in the 1990s and due to our skills and capabilities, have won many global and UK awards from Microsoft in that time. It has been a super relationship, but on strong operational and technical commitments and multi-million pound investments on both sides. Microsoft owes its enormous success to its sell-through partner model, which enables it to reach millions of global organisations without the need for hiring thousands of sales personnel in every geography. Bytes has hundreds of people with Microsoft certifications, young, energetic, capable people with a thirst for knowledge and a desire to do well. Given Microsoft's diversification into gaming and hardware, some have referred to Bytes as more Microsoft than Microsoft. And this reflects our focus on Microsoft's cloud, data, and office productivity segments. Microsoft now lays claim to being the world's largest cybersecurity company, And this complements our long-term security focus, which now equates to around 25% of our overall gross profits. We're excited by the prospects for the commercial launch of Microsoft's AI-powered Copilot 365 products on November the 1st. As their biggest UK partner, we are well positioned to benefit over the next few years from Microsoft's huge investments in AI. We continue to invest in the relationship by expanding our services portfolio and by achieving the very highest technical accreditations. This further strengthens and cements our relationship with Microsoft, and it also makes us even stickier to our customer base as they come to rely on us to help them prepare for the implementation of new and existing technologies. I'll now hand over to Andrew to talk you through the financials in a bit more detail.

Thanks Neil. I'll now take you through our financial results for the first half of FY24. The first six months of the year seen continued double-edged growth across all our key performance indicators. GII has increased 37.6% year-on-year with growth spread across all income streams. While software sales remain our core focus, contributing 95% of the total GII, we've also seen good double-digit growth across both hardware and service sales. The group's already substantial presence in the public sector has been bolstered by several significant Microsoft contract wins, and this has resulted in our public sector GII increasing 44% to 722 million pounds whilst our corporate GRI increased 25.7% to £360 million. This means our overall GRI mix has moved slightly compared to last year, now with 67% generated in the public sector against corporate's 33% contribution. Gross profit increased 15% to £75.3 million. This is below the growth of the GRI primarily, due to agreeing lower margins on some of the big strategic wins within the public sector clients. Neil will come on and talk about this later in the presentation, but this is consistent with our land and expand strategy, where we believe we can sell more to these clients, increasing profitability over the next two to five years. Administrative costs have risen slightly ahead of our growth in gross profit. This is mainly due to investing in our people, with headcount growing by 96 employees and rising above 1,000 for the first time. This equates to a growth of 10%, with over half of our employees being in frontline sales. Employee costs, including commissions and share-based payments, which make up 80% of our cost base, grew at 20.2%. Adjusted operating profit, which excludes amortisation of acquired intangibles and share-based payments, is up 13.8% to 33.9 million pounds. The net finance income of 2.7 million pounds relates to the interest earned from positive cash balances. As everyone's aware, corporate tax increased to 25% on the 1st of April. This plus our growth has meant that our income tax expense has increased by 49% to 7.9 million pounds, This makes our effective tax rate for the first half 23.8%. Profit after tax increased 17.1% to £25.4 million, with the impact of higher tax rates largely being offset by interest income. Free cash flow from operations was strong during the reporting period, generating a positive net inflow of £16.5 million. During the period, we invested £3 million into acquiring the 25.1% stake in our AWS service partner, CloudBridge. This has given us access to over 80 skilled resources, allows us to present a multi-cloud strategy to our customers and maintains internal focus on our Microsoft offerings. After this investment, tax payments and £30 million in dividend payments, we are left with a healthy cash balance of £51.7 million. The group's cash conversion ratio for the period was 48.7%. This is considered normal for the first half and we expect H2 to be higher than H1. Our rolling cash conversion for the 12 months to 31st of August stood at 107.2%. For the same period last year, this cash conversion was 65.3%. The group continues to target a sustainable cash conversion ratio of 100%. and we are focused on achieving this for the full year FY24. Our capital allocation policy remains unchanged with our priority being to ensure that we invest appropriately to support our organic growth. This includes investing in our people so that we can attract and retain the talented employees needed to drive growth and at the same time enhancing our value proposition to our customers. We remain a capital light business with less than £900,000 spent on CAPEX in the first six months. This includes some refurbishment in Leatherhead, aligning our premises to the new ways of work for our employees. Our dividend policy is to return 40% of post-tax adjusted operating profits to our shareholders via ordinary dividends. This is further broken down into approximately one-third as an interim dividend and the balance as a final dividend at the end of the financial year. I am pleased therefore to announce that the Board has approved an interim dividend of 2.7 pence per share, which is 12.5% up on the prior period's interim dividend of 2.4 pence per share. While organic growth remains our focus, we do have a strong track record of acquiring and integrating when the right opportunities arise. We continue to assess investments that could potentially enhance our value on a highly selective basis. Our investment into Clybridge is a good example of this. Sustainability is not optional. Between our employees, customers, vendors and shareholders, we have a powerful platform from which we can make a positive contribution to society. Over the last two years, we have been focusing on our efforts of reducing Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. This year, this has widened to include relevant measurements from within the Scope 3 categories, and we are formally committed to submit our targets to SBTI for validation. We know that high inflation environment has affected all our employees to some extent. The three main drivers of inflation are utilities, transport costs and food. These items typically make up a large portion of the lower paid employees' disposable income, and therefore high inflation is more keenly felt by this segment of our employee base. When granting our annual salary increases in March of this year, we have tried as far as possible to allocate more of this pot to these colleagues. I would also like to take this opportunity to note the appointment of Sam Mudd to the board as an executive director. Sam has been a long-standing MD of the Phoenix business, which has a particular focus on the public sector.

to end we've had another strong half from a financial performance perspective and we remain well positioned for the balance of the year back to neil thank you andrew by now many of you will be very familiar with our strategy it is straightforward and it has not changed for the last decade our business sells software and i.t solutions to existing and new customers and each year we aim to expand the wallet share of the customer base by upselling and cross-selling new solutions. We know this works. You can see from the chart on the right a CAGR of gross profit growth over the last 10 years to February 23 of almost 18%. In the half under review, we've continued to invest in more headcount to create future bandwidth for our sales engine to deliver greater scale and continued growth. We've shown over the years our ability to grow our market share, and we'll continue to see further gains as we invest in our business. A key part of this will be to work strategically with high growth software companies, especially in cloud and cyber, so that we're in the best possible position when it comes to helping customers with product selection. We are well-placed to assist customers and broaden the use of AI in their IT strategies. We are particularly excited about the potential of Microsoft Co-Pilot and look forward to rolling this out to our customers in due course. This represents another tailwind as we enter 2024 and we expect this to gain momentum over the next two to three years until it becomes a normalized product selection for our customer clients. Given our low single digit market share of the total addressable IT market, we continue to view our organic growth as our biggest strategic opportunity, and that remains our priority. In the headline slide at the beginning of this results presentation, I spoke of the very strong growth in sales, and I'd now like to take a few moments to explain the background behind this abnormally high growth rate. Bytes was awarded a five-year contract by the National Health Service to supply Microsoft Cloud software and potentially other vendor solutions to provide a platform for future innovation in healthcare. For many years now, we've taken the approach of investing in new customer relationships by agreeing to lower margins up front. This has enabled us to win long-term, high-value contracts. It's an established element of our sales strategy. However, it's not often that we win a contract with a sale value approaching £900 million over five years. We were delighted to win this very prestigious contract. It's the biggest ever Microsoft contract in the UK and it now means we have a seat at the table for the entire NHS to embark upon our land and expand approach. We believe we can help deliver a real difference in productivity for the NHS and we also believe that we can earn a good return on this long-term contract. This year's contract value was £140 million. The overall NHS IT budget exceeds some £4 billion per annum and supports over 1.4 million users. By adopting a multi-cloud strategy, all NHS staff will have access to the latest digital tools as part of the ongoing efforts to improve efficiency. This helped our business grow top line sales by 37.6%. How did we do without this NHS win? I'm pleased to say we would still have recorded top line sales growth of over 19% without this contract, which is a very positive indicator of our broad-based sales growth. So, in summary, we have a tried and tested business model which has continued to pay off for all of our stakeholders. We continue to enjoy a large addressable market with well-established and persistent tailwinds supported by increasing global IT spend. With increased scale, we expect to continue delivering double-digit growth across our key financial metrics as well as increases in market share. Despite the mixed macroeconomic backdrop, demand has remained strong across all verticals and across all business lines that we operate in. The group also benefits from a robust balance sheet and no debt. And finally, we are confident that our proven strategy means we are well placed to continue our progress over the remainder of the financial year and in the years to come.

Many thanks for attending today and we'll now take questions. on your telephone keypad. That is star one for your question. And our first question today comes from Tin Tin Stormant of Numis. Please go ahead.

Good morning, guys. A couple of questions from me. First on AI, we all know the strength of the relationship with Microsoft and other software vendors. Are there other parts of the tech stack or vendors where you feel you should double down in order to fully capitalize on the AI opportunity. And then second question on AOP as a percent of GP, guiding for sort of kind of around 43% for the full years, obviously still being very healthy, especially if you compare it with global resellers. How do you feel about sort of investing in areas that might take longer to deliver returns? You talked about a 10% growth in gross profit per customer. Can you push that much higher? say, with a bigger menu of products and services to sell? And how do you think about sort of kind of the medium term in terms of kind of building out that menu of products and services?

Hi, Tintin, and you're very greedy on the questions there. That's at least three.

Sorry. Oh, no, no.

Thank you. So just the first one, yes, with other vendors, we're engaged very heavily with vendors like Adobe, for example. I think also if you look at some of the cybersecurity vendors today, AI has been sort of part of their sort of complex for several years. But Adobe is one I'd call out. I mean, they're launching their new creative suite products with AI componentry. There's a new word, by the way, componentry in November. And I think that's going to drive a sort of tailwind in the sort of advertising and marketing and sort of creative industry. But they've been a well-established partner of ours for many years. I think, you know, we keep an open eye to what our other vendor partners are doing. Today, it's still very early to say, to be honest with you, I do think there's quite a significant amount of hype in the market. And I think what we're looking forward to is the ability to monetize products that are available to sell, which is really the part we play in this sort of IT ecosystem. So products from Microsoft and Adobe and the cyber partners like CrowdStrike and Darktrace and others, are available now. So that's part of our focus. I think moving on to some of your other questions, when we look at our AOP to GP conversion ratio, and yes, we indicated that settling at about 43% by the year end is about right, We think that does allow us to invest for the long-term, Tintin. We're on a long-term cycle of investment, so the rewards we're anticipating next year are fundamentally coming from the investments we've been making, not just last year, but for the previous 5, 10, 15 years. We think we've got a formula that enables us to repeat investments this level of growth, and we're confident that we can repeat this going forwards at a sustainable level of 43%. And then, you know, the other question about growth per customer at around about 10%, you know, I do think we have the opportunity there to increase that, and we're certainly aiming to do that going forwards. Am I comfortable with growth of 10% growth in GP per customer? Yes, I am, actually. It's slightly above last year, so that's an improvement. We like improvements, and I think there's a great opportunity to grow that as we go through the next few years. Did that cover off everything? I think it did.

Yep. Thank you.

Thank you. And we're moving on to Andrew Ripper of Liberum. Please go ahead.

Morning, Neil and Andrew. Well done on the results. I've got two questions. We'll do one at a time. So first one, just wanted to ask about Copilot, whether you've got any clients that have been trialing it, what the feedback from them have been like, and what's your expectation in terms of how quickly clients may upgrade and what proportion of seats that you license in the UK do you think is addressable So who do you think is most likely to sort of take up co-pilot?

Thanks, Andrew. You know, there's various versions of Copilot, and some of them are available today. So, for example, GitHub Copilot's been available for developers for a while now. And, of course, Copilot for Windows is freely available. Yeah, customers that are using it today, there are a number of them using pre-production and beta versions. I can't tell you about any of those in particular. But broadly speaking, if we look at our base of clients, we're just expecting that the uptake of Copilot will be a gradual phenomenon that's going to increase in momentum as we go into 24 to 25 to 26. It's obviously a very hard thing to predict. We do have millions of Office 365 users, and, of course, we'll be actively engaging with those clients. We're running a very important seminar for our clients on November the 9th. We've got hundreds of customers attending that particular event. And what we're spending our time right now, Andrew, doing is – really explain to customers how they need to prepare for the implementation and the deployment of Copilot. It's not a straightforward activity, which is why I say this thing will gain momentum as we get into the next year and beyond. So I think a slow uptake. If we look forward two or three years, I do expect this to be an established product that customers will add to their enterprise agreements or their CSP agreements. I'm expecting it to be well-received. Certainly the beta versions, the pre-productions versions that I've seen are pretty exciting. It takes a lot for me to get excited about software, so I'm hoping our customers will be equally as excited when they see it. And so, Andrew, what's the second question?

Yeah, so second question I wanted to ask about public sector. Obviously, it's had a meaningful impact on the GII in this half, and you've sort of gone through the NHS contract in some detail. What was your experience last time around, maybe taking the NHS as an example or talking more broadly about in terms of how you've been able to sort of increase profitability over the life of the contract. Maybe just give us some guide rails as to how GEP relative to GII might trend over the five-year life. And then I think you've done more than NHS. Maybe you could reference what else you've won in the public sector in the half. And finally, just is there any cash implication from the sort of shift in GII mix? Will we see any change in sort of receivables and payables profiles. Thanks.

Yes, I mean, the strategy to sort of land and expand by winning long term contracts at lower margin has been in place now for several years. So, you know, our GP growth is already in the numbers in terms of what we've done historically. So because, you know, this isn't a new phenomenon for us. So Typically, in any large project, once you become an established supplier, you do tend to be introduced into other opportunities. And that's, in our view, in our experience, where we've seen the opportunity to grow incremental profits and revenues. As I say, this is a tried and established sort of modus operandi for our sales teams. And so we've demonstrated with our high-value, low-margin bids that we've won in the past how in subsequent years that we've been able to grow our GP. I think we've done some analysis that shows 19 situations of this type. where in the subsequent years we've been able to grow the gross profit. So it definitely works for us. And as part of the overall mix, you'll know from our previous results that, you know, public sector at a top line sales number is about two thirds of our business, yet represents only about one third of the profitability. And that remains a consistent ratio for our business. I'm pretty pleased with the consistency of that. So we're satisfied that going forwards we'll be able to increase the profitability of those longer-term contracts. And the mere fact of having a relationship now that we're going to have for five years in one of the UK's most significant institutions, where IT is going to play an important part in producing greater efficiencies and productivity, It sort of gives me the confidence that we'll be able to do more with that particular organisation. And you asked about other bids of a similar kind. Yeah, there was HMRC. It was one we were very pleased to win. That was around about £35 million worth of business. I'm delighted that the Inan Revenue will be giving me something back, having given them quite a bit over the years. And I think that's a similar sort of situation where our land and expand strategy will be deployed over the next five years in that particular customer. Andrew, do you want to talk about the cash line?

Yes. So, Andrew, thanks for that question. We've been in a fortunate position where our public sector clients are very good payers in actual fact. So we don't see the sort of the the extreme growth that we've seen in the public sector affecting our cash in any way. And a lot of these big contracts are invoiced around March, April of the year and are paid before our half year. So it's all good. Thank you.

Yeah, that's great. Thanks for your answers, guys.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Rahul Chopra of HSBC. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning. I have three quick questions. First, in terms of, could you just discuss, again, coming back to Microsoft Co-Pilot, readiness of UK customer, more specifically for SMB and public sector in particular, and more specifically within your installed client base, what proportion of customers are already with Enterprise E5 and have you, in your view, would potentially take up with minimum commitment of 300 users initially. So I want to understand some dynamics around that in terms of what work you have done. The second question is around basically could you give us just in terms of rebate structure from Microsoft of new products with existing products. Is it likely to change or do you think it's likely to remain similar to current rebate structure? And finally a housekeeping question on 2.9 million of interest income in H121. Sorry, H1 numbers. compared to your cash balance of 60 million average for H1N1 last year, it looks quite large. So I just wanted to understand the dynamics around that interest income, what's going on. Please, thank you.

Yeah, thanks very much, those. On co-pilot readiness for SMB and public sector, really... I can't give you a great answer for that because I genuinely don't know. It's such a new set of products. I think we've all read and understood a reasonable amount about what the potential is for these products, but I think our SMB and public sector clients are really in the same shoes as we are, and that is we want to understand more. We want to understand how we can deploy this. We want to understand the commercials. We want to understand the potential to gain productivities and efficiencies Please can you help us understand this? And that is the role we'll be playing out the remainder of this calendar year and into next year. If we look at our installed client base of E5, again, yes, you're right about the minimum 300 user threshold for the enterprise agreement side of things. We're fortunate enough to manage thousands of enterprise agreements across the UK and Ireland in both public sector and private sector. And a high proportion of them are E5 users. But again, I'd have to look into a bit more detail to give you a more detailed answer in terms of the mix there, Raoul. So I'll come back to you at a later stage on that one. But it's fair to say that the same momentum I talked about earlier would probably apply whether you're E3, E5, SMB, public sector, corporate. It's one of those situations where there's a lot of education and understanding that needs to take place before customers are in a situation to adopt and deploy. The rebate structure, we're not expecting any kind of change. We're expecting and we've been led to believe from Microsoft that there's no change to the overall rebate schemes. We're expecting rebates to be managed in the same way they are today. So we're hoping to see the same sort of economic benefit for scale that we would see for any other kind of sales environment. And then onto the last question, Andrew.

Yes, Rahul, the question is around interest income in the first half and in comparison to last year. So I guess the interest earning sort of environment in the UK has been very recent and We entered into agreements with our banks to open up overnight and money market accounts early in the calendar year this year. And if you recall, we carried £73 million on our cash balances at full year. Now, we paid out $30 million in dividends after our annual general meeting in July, so inherently we had that sort of dividends in interest-bearing accounts for the first half, and that sort of has meant maybe higher than normal interest income, and certainly it will not be quite as high in the second half.

Thank you very much.

And up next, we have Alex Nguyen of Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. So I have two questions, and I will go one by one. First of all, so Microsoft obviously pushed our robot set of number last night with about 15% of expected growth for their productivity segment. This reflected in your results today and then the comment around robots grow in the UK IT space. Now, obviously, I know there are differences between you and SoftCat and Computer Center, but can you just talk a little bit more? How should we reconcile your strong results today with the comments from SoftCat yesterday about customers becoming more conscious, and then also similar observations from Computer Center about software UK backdrops? That would be my first one.

Okay. Thanks, Alex. So I can only speak for ourselves, for our business. I can't really comment on the other companies. We are fortunate as a business that with our focus on software, we have a different kind of product mix. And I think that insulates us from some of the cyclicality that you see in other sectors of the IT market, particularly the sort of hardware side of the industry. So we do have a level of resilience because of the product mix. our operation I think it's fair to say we've had good growth in the first half of the year and and we expect the second half to be a repeat essentially of what we've seen in the first half we do have a broad base of clients there is no sort of customer centricity there's no overly concentrated segment of our client base so that broad base of customers gives us another level of resilience and And as I say, we're expecting sort of continued growth in those areas that we're focusing in, with cloud, cybersecurity in particular. So that would explain our view on the outlook. Certainly looking forwards, you know, because we have a high level of annuity in the business, again, that gives us a degree of visibility for our forward-looking revenue position and sales position. And the sales pipeline reflects that level of positivity.

Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks, Neil. And then the second question that I have would just be the economics of the lower margin public sector contracts that you pointed out. I understand the rationale that the economics will improve going forward, but then can you comment whether these contracts are taken on initially at a loss? And if that is the case, do you fully absorb those loss in the P&L or you spread them out over the life of the contract?

So to maybe answer them in reverse, we act as an agent with software sales. So we take all expenses and all revenues GII into account when we place the invoice with our customers. So there's no spreading of cost or losses or profits across the term of the contract. and then we have won these contracts at a lower than, let's say, our average margins, and those are fully baked into H1's costs. So any expansion into the future would be positive on our income.

That's very clear. And then can I just follow up with a small other one? I noticed around... a couple million of uptick in the contract asset, and then you mentioned that most of the public, the major public contracts have been paid already. So can I seek some clarification around one of these uptake about or is it just like a natural progression as the business grows?

It's a natural progression as the business grows and we would have some of the contract assets being in our services contracts that would be multi sort of years and most likely spread over a year. So you'll see those coming down towards the full year as well. And just a reminder, services are not a big portion of our income, but a very important part of it.

Cool. Thank you.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Patrick O'Donnell from GoodBuddy Stock Brokers. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Just two questions for me. I think Sofka called out what they believed their share in wallet was yesterday. And how many customers they're with, just in terms of where you currently are, what you think Byte's current wallet represents the percentage of the total SME wallet right now, and some similar stats, if you could give us a like for like. And then the second question is, back to Copilot, given the sort of, I suppose, the preparation you're ongoing on the trial phase, are you also prepared building into sort of the recruitment drive? Sales professionals with background in AI expertise, have you had to augment your your own in-house AI sales expertise as you sort of see this as a long-term opportunity. Thanks.

Yeah, thanks, Patrick. Share of the wallet, you know, certainly we look at this, obviously, on a regular basis. If you were drawing comparisons with Softcat, as you mentioned in the question just then, we would estimate that our average is well below that purely by definition in that we don't sell an awful lot of hardware components and products. Our product range is less than there. So I would expect that if we're doing a like-for-like comparison, as you've asked there, you know, we're looking at sort of 15% to 20% of wallet share. It's obviously... not an exact science in terms of giving you the full answer to that. And the reason for that is our customers don't know what our IT spend is half the time. So it's very hard for us to sort of guesstimate that. But given that that's a well understood sort of metric from one of our best competitors, I would say we're just slightly underneath that in general. We've put figures forward for the half year, by the way. So our figures don't represent the full year sort of number. Obviously, we'll update the market for the growth of the 12-month point. On the co-pilot question, you raise a very interesting point because we can hardly go out there and hire lots of experienced AI people because they don't readily exist. So in our recruitment drive at the moment, certainly if we look at, say, the first half, half of our recruitment has been in sales, and the other half includes some technical capabilities, personnel. We'll be growing our own, Patrick, is the answer. We need to give people hands-on experience in the technology over the next few years in order to get the right capabilities ourselves. And so we are putting people through training courses and boot camps, and people will be learning from now on. And obviously, we have access to all the white papers and technical documentations from Microsoft and other vendors. And our people will be sitting training courses and exams so that we can get as many of them qualified and accredited as we possibly can between now and going forwards. So, yeah, hopefully that answers your question, Patrick.

Yeah, and does that mean sort of like, you know, you expect that sales team to hit the ground running as and when those products become operationally you know, a bigger part of your business? You're sort of future-proofing the sales model?

Yeah, I mean, you know, the sales force don't act in isolation. I mean, we're proud of the fact that our sales people work with a whole orchestra of additional resources that enable them to bring to the clients the right solutions. So they're not acting independently or in isolation. Salespeople work in teams, and they're complemented by teams of pre-sales and post-sales technical capabilities and individuals to help them. So we don't let raw talent out into our customers without the right level of expertise. So they get sheep dipped in certainly Microsoft technologies to begin with before we let them loose online. on people like yourself, Patrick. So rest assured that they'll have the right skills by the time they're talking to customers.

Very good. Thank you, Neil. Cheers.

Thank you. And our next question now comes from James Saramba of Barclays. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Three questions, please. Firstly, SoftCap spoke about the benefits of a broad vendor offering platform. whilst also flagging the challenge for a sales force to stay aware of all products. What factors do you consider really balance between breadth and expertise in your product portfolio? Then on people, I know attrition wasn't a big problem for you ever, but is the less competitive employment market now helping you scale? Then lastly, Andrew, sorry, I might have missed this, but can you elaborate on the trends of the components of receivables and payables in the period.

Thanks. Yeah, thanks, James. So, you know, our particular product offering and our particular product mix has suited us for 10, 15, 20 years. And we've deliberately chosen not to have the broadest vendor offering precisely because we think that being subject matter experts and having a clear focus on fewer products is the right thing for us to do. So I couldn't comment on what our friends have said, but It is always a challenge to stay on top of 10 or 15, 20 different vendors, let alone hundreds. And so I think that focus that we're offering has enabled our growth over the past 10 or 15 years. And certainly the fact that we don't have the broadest offering has certainly not been an inhibitor to our growth going forward. So I think we have the right sort of balance. Having said all of that, of course, we do offer a whole range of hardware products as well to our clients, but it remains a fairly small component of our overall product offering. So we're comfortable with the product mix we have today. I think as far as hiring and people are concerned, I've noted the fact that I think people are sort of staying put a bit more frequently now rather than jumping ship and moving around as they were a year or two ago. Yeah, I'd say that probably has helped. We've certainly, you know, we've increased headcount in the first half by 10%, which is about 100 people. I think talking to the recruitment team, we had to interview about 400 plus people to get those 100. And I haven't heard that hiring has become much easier, but it certainly is not a challenge for us at the moment. So, Andrew?

So, thanks, Neil. So, the components of the balance sheet, the working capital components, we've obviously inventories are zero or close to zero, trade and other receivables are Two comparatives there as against last year, the H1 to H1, and then obviously full year to H1. So not much movement in the receivables. Last year it was 184, and that's H1 to 177 this year. So slightly down. So we are not – I think if you look at creditor days, very similar to this time last year. So we're not – Exceeding any of the contract terms that we have with our vendors. So quite pleased with that and bearing in mind that our biggest vendor is Microsoft and we make sure that that is always up to date and clean. And then on the receivables, again, not much movement on the receivables. We do have that sort of seasonal impact there. where we have debtors' days going slightly out by half-year and by full-year retracting back in. So I think in a summary, it is normal, and the growth that we've seen in some of those lines are more in line with the growth of the profits in the GRI. maybe of particular importance is sort of 36% up, 37% up in the GRI. We have to collect that money, and that's where the sort of the working capital would come into not very much of the GDP lines.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. And our last question for today comes from Harry Reid of Redburn Atlantic. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe one at a time. The first one, obviously, Microsoft last night, very good print, and it seems like the cloud optimization cycle is coming to an end and growth is bottoming. Just trying to understand, I know it's not all the business from Microsoft, but understanding how late cycle you are versus that growth coming into the hyperscaler itself or when you could see the benefits coming into cloud spend reaccelerating.

Yeah, hi, Harry. I think we look at it a little bit differently. The clients that Microsoft have globally and that we see here in the UK, their digital transformation IT strategies and spend cycles are all different. You've got tens of thousands of customers all operating at different speeds, all with slightly different IT strategies. And so you're seeing cloud adoption advance at a different pace in different client sets. We're fortunate enough, you know, with only a sort of low single digit market share to have thousands of customer opportunities in the UK that we haven't yet engaged with. And so we see the opportunity as one of increasing market share rather than measuring, you know, how Microsoft are doing against AWS at the global level and so on. We see such a large runway of opportunity by taking market share gains and That is where our focus is. So we want to win hundreds of new clients each year, whilst at the same time cross-sell and up-sell dozens and dozens of different solutions, not just Microsoft product sets, into our clients. And so we do look at it a bit differently. I think it was very encouraging to see the growth that Microsoft had seen in that first quarter year. They are very excited about their opportunity next year and beyond. Certainly, if you listen to Mr. Nadella's outlook statement yesterday, he was very, very upbeat about the potential growth for Microsoft. So I think there's tailwinds out there that didn't exist six months ago with AI and Copilot. So we're excited about taking advantage of those opportunities in the next few years.

Okay, brilliant. Thank you. And then maybe just one for Andrew. I've seen that share-based comp has ticked up a little bit as a percentage of GP, 2.5% to just under 4% in the last two halves. Obviously quite a large impact on your margin when you strip it out on a non-gap basis. Is 4% the kind of rate we could expect going forward?

We are... As to sort of maturing that sort of growth, and the reason for it is we've been listed now, if we roll on to December, for three years. In June next year, we would have then allocated the fourth round of the long-term incentives. So that means by June next year, the growth in that number will certainly stop. And then in December this year, the pre-IPO growth, awards that we've made mature as well in our vesting, so that cost comes out as well. So you would expect by this time next year a more, we'll call it a flatter number on share-based payments.

Is that in absolute terms?

That will be in absolute terms, yes.

Okay, very clear. And then just one more short one. Obviously, by the way that the sales force is set up, it's more longer-term account managers versus the likes of Softcat, which has a shorter sales program, et cetera. Just wondering what your contingency plans are for when these account managers do decide to retire. Do you have younger account managers that support the account that can continue? I'm just interested in what the continuation plan is there.

Yeah, Harry, that's a good question. And as we've evolved and grown as an organization, one of the reasons we've been able to grow so well and so consistently is precisely because our senior account managers over time expand their client portfolio to such a degree that they hire beneath them salespeople who are junior account managers who become senior account managers and over time become account directors and essentially replace the account director that retires or moves on. So you have that sort of constant sort of feeding in of talent and capability there. so that the customer experience remains consistent. And that is at such a mature level now within the organization that I'm pleased to say that the sort of potential weakness there that you highlight has never manifested itself as an actual weakness. Touch wood. And we're pretty proud of the fact that our account directors are very happy to introduce more people into their clients It gives us continuity. It gives us a high degree of customer stickiness. I'm still very proud of the fact that only one of our top 50 account directors has left the organization in the last seven years. So there's a high retention at the senior level, and that's really because of the high rewards that they're able to claim and to receive. and to benefit from. But also we're pretty pleased with the motivational plans that we have in place and the incentive schemes generally. So it is a high-reward, sort of highly incentivised environment that they operate in. But we have a high degree of consistency and training and account management programmes in place to prevent precisely that sort of thing from happening, Harry. So we're very comfortable with where we sit in that environment.

Brilliant. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you. And if there are no further questions in the queue, I would now like to hand the call back over to you, Neil, for any additional or closing remarks.

Yeah, thank you very much, everybody, for attending today. We look forward to speaking with many of you over the next few days as we embark on the roadshow and take your questions and answer further questions from you. So thanks very much for your time today.