Computacenter PLC (LON:CCC), the information technology (IT) services provider, said trading in the first quarter was pleasing, considering the current conditions.
At the group level, revenue was down slightly compared to the corresponding period of 2019 but profitability remained in-line with the previous year.
The group expects profitability in the first half of 2020 will be on a par with the same period of 2019, or even slightly ahead, but the picture in the second half is much cloudier.
Trading during the period when the coronavirus (COVID-19) started spreading beyond Asia has been more robust than Computacenter’s management had expected at the start of the crisis but it has been a case of losing on the swings what it gained on the roundabout.
There has been a surge in demand from many of Computacenter’s customers looking to enable business continuity particularly around homeworking and network resilience. Conversely, particularly in the industrial sector, where a large number of its customers have had to cease production, the group’s engineers and consultants are unable to work.
To mitigate the cost of carrying these staff while retaining them for the long term, the group has placed around 10% of its employees across Europe on wage-subsidy programmes using various governments' initiatives. The majority of these employees are engineers, project managers and consultants.
In common with a lot of companies, Computacenter has had second thoughts about paying a recently proposed dividend and has yanked the final dividend in respect of 2019.
“While it wouldn't surprise us to see a short-term dip in demand, as enterprises return to work, we believe that the need to invest in technology and in particular a robust IT infrastructure has been brought in to clear focus by recent events,” the company said.