Bytes Technology Group plc (BYIT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. I'm Sam Mudd, the CEO of Bytes Technology Group, and thank you for joining us for our live presentation of our financial year-end results. We also have a live stream audience. So welcome to those of you that are watching on the screen, and I'm delighted to be here alongside Andrew. I've had the pleasure of meeting a number of you before, but for those of you that I have not yet met, here's a quick introduction. I was previously the Managing Director of Phoenix Software for nearly a decade, and I've been a member of the Board since July, which has given me a close understanding of the operations of the group working with Andrew and Patrick, our Chair. The circumstances around my appointment are, of course, well known, and I wanted to take a moment to share some of my perspectives of Bytes and the opportunities we have ahead of us. Having worked in IT for many decades, I can detect when a culture is working and feels vibrant and purposeful. And this is very much the case for Bytes. The tenure and experience that we have across our staff positions us to continue to deliver what our customers need in the form of licensing advice, recommendations on solutions and procurement, and this is underpinned by our staff's commitment to delivering for our customers. I'm continually impressed with our expertise and capabilities across multiple technology areas, including new innovative solutions, such as generative AI, Copilot and how we cater for the ongoing demand for cloud adoption, backup storage and security solutions. These will be our key focus areas in 2024 and '25. One of our strategic strengths most certainly lies in our exhaustive list of vendor partners, many at the highest levels of accreditation available to any channel partner, global or local. We are relevant and well informed on the latest vendor commercial offerings and how to match them to our customer needs. Turning to our financial highlights, Bytes delivered over GBP 145 million in gross profit in this year, an increase of 12.5%, and an adjusted operating profit of GBP 63.3 million, up 12.2%, driven by contributions from all areas of our business, but particularly in software. Growth from our public sector clients was particularly strong due to strategically important contract wins, and we're also pleased that our business from our corporate customers grew strongly again. Our AOP to gross profit margin of 43.4% continued to meet our target of exceeding 40%, while cash conversion was also in excess of 100%, in line with our expectations. Despite the macroeconomic challenges, software and cloud demand remains strong in the U.K., and we have taken advantage of that. The momentum is there for us to make continued progress in FY '25 as customers are still evolving their IT environment to capitalize on the technology available to help them drive productivity and efficiencies. The financial performance of '23 and '24 has continued the consistent trends of growth in our key reporting metrics that we've delivered over a prolonged period of time. We're very proud of this track record, and we will spend some time now explaining the key drivers of this performance. Our consistent financial performance is only possible because of our dedicated workforce, and we continue to invest in growing our sales teams and supporting functions that will allow us to deliver custom service that is expected of us. 97% of the GP in the year came from our existing customers, reflecting the stable account management culture we have and our commitment to meeting client requirements. And as we've grown as a business, so has our regional office presence. In the last 30 months, we've opened a further 2 offices in the city of London and Sunderland, bringing us closer to our customers in these important areas of growth, including financial services, retail and public sector. During 2023 and '24, we increased our head count by 13.7% to 1,057 staff across the business, including sales and support, which came on top of the 20.3% head count increase in the previous financial year. Our continued investments in technical expertise, of which there were 264 heads, which is 25% of our staff total, means we're able to capitalize on the opportunities we can see in the market. This investment in technical skills is important to provide our customers with the advice needed to make the right technology choices in a constantly evolving IT environment. At a cultural level, we continue to go from strength to strength, and our eNPS score was an impressive 71. Moving forward, employee morale will continue to be an area of focus for us and the management team during the course of the year. Both Bytes Software Services and Phoenix Software have been named among the U.K.'s top 50 Best Workplaces in the large company category. This, in addition, to both being listed by the Great Places in Tech, Women and Wellbeing categories. These exemplify that despite growing and scaling our operations, we have maintained a healthy culture for our staff to thrive in. And finally, we're delighted to have appointed Clare Metcalfe as MD Phoenix Software following an extended period of time in a senior leadership position within the business. Our diversified customer base is approaching 6,000 clients, and we're pleased to report that 97% of GP in the year came from our existing customers with 109% renewal rate reflecting the stable account management culture we have and our commitment to meeting client requirements. The stickiness of the customer base is in part due to the large volume of nondiscretionary spend from U.K. corporate and public sector organizations where IT is vital to their day-to-day running, and this is evidenced by the high renewal rates of annuity-type contracts, which represent over 70% of our sales GP. Security represents 25% of our GP, and backup and storage and remote working technology are all still in demand despite a challenging economic backdrop. These software licenses are required to enable a business to function in the same way they need gas and electricity. And thus we have a high level of repeat business year-on-year. Inevitably, we're also seeing growing demand from customers for support and guidance around AI products and functionality, and this represents a significant opportunity for us, not least with Microsoft Copilot. And we're focused on capitalizing on this emerging technology while helping our customers review their infrastructure, their data centers, their security and preparedness for this new era of AI. As a business, we have strong historical vertical capabilities in areas such as education, policing, NHS and public sector, and in corporate sales channel, but also particular expertise in retail, legal, finance and private health. We understand our customers' business challenges and their budgetary constraints and procurement routes that make our relationship more strategic and enduring. And the logos here depict our diversified customer base and our strong industry NPS score of 82. This is a testament to the fabulous experience that we provide to our customers. Here are 2 case studies I'm going to quickly take you through. The first one is CFC, which is a great example of a strategic customer with whom we gained their trust and are able to show how we can grow our share of wallet to a wide range of products and services. Bytes have worked with CFC for more than 5 years with our initial engagements focusing on advising the team as they move their outsourced IT infrastructure back in-house. This included advising on the appropriate technology to support the needs of their fast-growing company as well as to help them gain visibility and control of their spend. Our partnership has grown over the years and Bytes now supply, advise and maintain approximately 80% of their IT spend. CFC use Bytes for all software, hardware and services, and our consumers have managed service security and backup services, too. The total spend totaled GBP 2.8 million of sales, which is 75% more than was delivered by Bytes in the previous financial year. The second case study covers our partnership with the University of Stirling, which is a great example of our land-and-expand strategy in action. Phoenix Software has held a long-term relationship with the university mainly focused on their Microsoft and Adobe licenses over many years. But this strong partnership has helped us open up a really exciting stream of new business with them, a transformative 5-year commitment to support a research project on the River Forth, which will see us partnering with the team to create a digital twin of the river. This project demonstrates the opportunities that can be opened up by nurturing long-term relationships and multiple services that we can offer to businesses and institutions. I've talked a lot about our vendor partnerships, and it's key I underscore how important these relationships are to our strategy and how we go to market. You will see here the top tier strategic vendors we work with daily across both operations and where we drive a high proportion of our GP from. We benefit from over 100 strategic relationships with vendors and distributors across the group. There are strategic vendors we have worked with for decades, such as Dell, who have pivoted even more closely to channel in recent years and now rely on partners like Bytes for their reach and customer relationships that they no longer cover exhaustively. We're also focused on ensuring we're well placed to understand new distribution and customer procurement routes to markets such as Adobe and Microsoft Marketplace and also with new and up-and-coming vendors such as [indiscernible] who we've recently partnered with and we're excited about the physical security market opportunity we can see. Overall, we pride ourselves on being the best of the best in the industry. And these accreditation levels reflect that. We want to be the safe pair of hands that our customers trust. That brings a close to the first part of the presentation. I'll hand over to Andrew to now talk you through the financials in more detail.

Thanks, Sam, and good morning to everyone, and it's nice to be back in person for a change. And so I'll take you through the financial review and then a couple of words around our progress around our sustainability efforts. So starting off with gross income, invoiced income up 26.7% to just over GBP 1.8 billion. And this includes, obviously, the substantial Microsoft contract wins that we had in the first half of the FY. Just as a reminder, the biggest of those was the NHS contract coming in around about GBP 800 million over a 5-year period, and we're approaching the second year of that now. Gross profit, this increased by 12.5% to GBP 145.8 million and reflects the impacts of those large public sector contracts that we've won. And typically, these transact in the first year at a reduced margin and then lasting 3 to 5 years and we back ourselves and we have a strategy and track record of converting these, opening up other software, hardware services environments over the next years. And I think, Sam will come back and talk about the land-and-expand strategy in the latter part of the presentation. So as a result, GP/GII, this reduced to 8%, and that was a reduction of 1% from the prior year of 9%. However, if we strip out these sorts of major contract wins, it's very, very similar to the year-on-year comparisons of 9%. So administrative costs. Administrative costs are up 13.2%, and that's slightly ahead of our gross profit growth, but we have seen our employee costs rise in line with our gross profit at 12.5%. And then during the year, we've added 127 heads. We've ended up at 1,057 heads for the full year, and this equates to a 13.7% growth on the prior year. If you look at the employee-related expenses, 80% of our total remains within the administrative environment and then the non-human resources cost within our administrative increased by 16.2%. And this included some additional spend in our London office, which was new last year, if you recall, some additional spend around internal IT systems as we keep pace with the evolving environment and then some additional one-off costs that we've absorbed during the year. Adjusted operating profit, which excludes amortization of acquired intangibles and share-based payments, up 12.2% to GBP 63.3 million. And the efficiency ratio as a result of that, so efficiency ratio in our world is AOP divided by GP, remains at 43.4%, largely in line with the prior year of 43.5%. Finance costs. So finance costs up here, largely related to the fees associated with our revolving credit facility, which we renewed in May last year, undrawn, but from a prudence point of view, renewed it. And then there's a small amount of finance lease costs on right-of-use assets. And we've introduced electric car scheme for our staff, which is also included in those costs. And then for the first time in a long time, we've seen a significant interest being earned in our money market deposits and this total GBP 5.1 million for the year. So the growth of profits plus the higher corporate rates meant that our overall tax expense has grown by 47% from GBP 10 million to GBP 14.7 million. For this year, our effective tax rate is 23.9 million (sic) [ 23.9% ] slightly under the standard tax rate of 25% and this is primarily due to the reductions that have been allowed with the pre-IPO option vesting in December. So those were the 3-year anniversary. And then if we move to the next slide. So if we have a look at our makeup of gross profits and split across the corporate and public sectors, just a moment here, last year, we were reporting on GII. I've changed the slide to report on GP because it's more meaningful for us, and it's a key performance indicator. So software continues to make up the large portion of our sales, and this accounts for 94.5% of GII, and it contributes, as you can see on the slide, about 90% of our GP. And the balance of that is made up hardware sales and services, so hardware 3% of GP and services 7.2% of GP. The U.K. government continues to ramp up its investment in software, and we've had some success in winning some of these new contracts. This means that our overall mix by public sector to private sector has changed a little bit. So this year, we see 62% coming from GII on the public sector and 38% from the corporate sector. But as we've mentioned in the past that swings around in the GP with 65% of our GP coming from the private sector and 35% from the public sector. So if we look at partnering, so we partner with all the major global software vendors. And we take all of these solutions to our growing customer base. Microsoft continues to be at the very core of our offering and Microsoft makes up 64% of our GII and 50% of our gross profit as it was in the past. And you can see the top vendors there making up another about 1/4 of that 25% and then the long tail of our vendors, including services and hardware, making up the balance of 25%. Cash flow. So cash conversion continues to follow the same trends that we've seen in the past. And as a reminder, we see lower cash conversion in the first half and followed by a very strong cash conversion in the second. And this year was no different. At the end of the first half, we've seen a 48% and at the end of the second half, we've seen a 172% cash conversion. So this equates to 104% cash conversion for the full year, and this is very much in line with what we've reported over a number of years. Interesting enough, our debtor days for the year stood at 34 at the end of the financial year, down from the previous year's 37. And our credit days ended up at 44 days, slightly ahead of the 42 days in the prior year. Just to note, this is very much within our contractual terms, and we're pleased to have generated the cash that we did without impacting our debtors and our creditors. So there's good news there. We obviously have a very capital-light business, and that explains a very small GBP 1.3 million outlay into fixed assets. And then during the year, we spent GBP 3 million in acquiring the 25.1% stake in our Cloud Bridge, which was the AWS business, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in the cash allocation side. And then after tax and returning GBP 36.6 million to our shareholders, we are left with a cash balance of GBP 88.8 million for the year. So on to the capital allocation policy. As a reminder, how we think about our cash and deploying our capital, as our framework shows we focus on funding future growth and then investment into capital projects, inorganic growth through M&A and then shareholder returns. So on the latter, our dividend policy remains to return 40% of our post-tax adjusted operating profit to shareholders via ordinary dividends, and I'm pleased to announce that the Board is proposing a final dividend of 6p per share in addition to the 2.7p per share that we paid out as an interim dividend in December '23. This represents a 17.6% increase from the FY '23 final dividend. During the period, we invested the GBP 3 million I've really spoken about investing in -- acquiring the 25.1% stake in Cloud Bridge, and this gave us access into over 80 skilled resources into the AWS space, enabled our multi-cloud strategy and allowed the internal people to focus on our core, which is the Microsoft Azure stack. Cloud Bridge continues to deliver in line with our expectations, and they have recently started expanding into the UAE and into South Africa. It has become our practice to return excess cash to our shareholders. And with that, the Board also considers it appropriate to propose a special dividend of 8.7p per share, equaling the full year dividend and representing a 16% year-on-year increase. Sustainability is a fundamental part of who we are and how we do business. And over the past 2 years, we've been focusing our efforts on measuring the underlying categories within Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3. This year, we've completed our work on Scope 3. So all elements of Scope 3 now measured. And this has enabled us to submit our targets to SBTI for validation, and we're expecting that during the course of the year. We continue to support charitable donations, sponsorships and fundraising initiatives through our local and national charities. And one of the things that we're very proud of is our people and passion to make a real difference in our communities. And this year, we've seen our colleagues volunteer over 1,500 hours of time to support local initiatives. As we announced last week, the investigation that examined the circumstances around Neil Murphy's resignation has now been concluded. And hopefully, this draws a line and what has been a challenging 3 months' period for all of us. We're looking forward to a new era under Sam's leadership. We have strengthened our Board with Shruthi joining with 20 years of experience in various senior roles in the technology sector. She joined the Board on 1st of February. And then another 2 nonexecutive directors set to join the Board at the beginning of June, Ross Paterson, who joins with extensive CFO, listed Board experience. He's also currently Audit Chair of FTSE100 company, will take over as the Bytes Chair of Audit on 1st of June. And then Anna Vikstrom also joins us bringing significant Board experience around advancing diversity, equality and inclusion. We look forward to both of those individuals joining the Board and drawing on their expertise. The establishment of an ESG committee is a natural evolution of the company's governance arrangements. Anna will assume the role of the Chair of the new ESG Committee and will guide the committee to support the executive team in the execution of BTG's ESG and sustainability strategy. With that, I would like to hand back to Sam. Thanks.

So moving on to the summary and outlook. Our continued growth strategy remains the same and that we focus on our existing customers and growing share of wallet, winning new customers and being experts in great value, innovative IT products and services that customers need, identifying and targeting those customers and being straightforward and enjoyable to do business with. First, let's talk about the customers and wallet share. We're laser-focused on meeting the needs of our existing customers and providing that excellent guidance and support. The software and IT services markets are expected to see robust growth with increasing popularity in cloud computing, hybrid infrastructure and managed services. And Bytes continues to invest in its technical capabilities and grow its teams to meet the demand from our customers. In terms of growing our customers, the customer base, we will continue to grow organically by expanding our sales teams, winning new customers and doing more for existing customers by having regular touch points, account reviews, customer success engagements throughout the year as well as targeted marketing and invites to events and conferences. All of this to attract new customers and keep us closely aligned to our customers, to seek feedback on how we sustain our strategic relationships in the future. In keeping with the trend in recent years, software and IT services will continue to be the 2 biggest areas of technology that we focus on within each organization, and we're expected to see robust growth of that in the U.K. We'll do this with further technical heads added into our business to enable our solutions approach of selling and expanding our solution sales capabilities. And in reference to vendors, we have a strategic relationship and partnership with many of the world's leading software vendors and distribution channels. This includes a long and deeply embedded relationship with the likes of Adobe and Microsoft. But our ability to also pick up new and emerging vendors that are relevant for our customers is also a strength, and we'll continue to broaden our vendor partnerships where there is a good fit. Our reach to market is attractive for new vendors such as Wasabi and Tanium and many others that we need to work with, and as partners, they want scale and industry reputation that serves their needs and the appropriate routes to market via framework where public sector is concerned. And finally, as always, we will remain vigilant and open to suitable M&A transactions that will support the delivery of our strategic ambitions. As we look at our most strategic vendor partnership, there's no denying that Microsoft is a central one and has been the case for over 30 years, noting 68% of the group's gross invoice income and 50% of the GP is generated from sales of Microsoft products and associated services. Furthermore, our alignment and strategy is reflected in the recent awards won by Phoenix as Global Endpoint Management Partner of the Year 2023 and as the U.K. Partner of the Year in 2021 and Bytes as the Global Partner of Operational Excellence in 2022. These are awards that thousands of partners submit for and to win is quite a moment for us. From a customer perspective, there has been a huge appetite for Copilot since it was announced in March 2023. And we have supported thousands of individuals across all our sectors in becoming technically ready, deploying, securing and adopting Copilot for Microsoft 365. From a Bytes internal perspective, we're rolling it out across the group to 63% of our staff, including 100% of sales and marketing personnel. This means we'll be well positioned to sell Copilot and evangelize its benefits. Before moving on to our final slide, I just wanted to play a short testimonial from Microsoft to bring to life the strength of our partnership with them. [Presentation] Hello. My name is Eleri Gibbon, channel lead for Microsoft U.K. It's been a pleasure to partner with Bytes Technology Group, comprising of the 2 businesses, Bytes Software Services and Phoenix Software, who have both been strategic Microsoft partners for over 3 decades. It's been great to see us influence each other's businesses over the years. Their comprehensive capabilities cover software licensing, cloud innovation, AI integration and security managed services, all of which are essential for navigating the digital evolution and customer needs. Now reflecting on their growth and development over the years and their commitment to people, there's something quite special about the culture at Bytes Technology Group. As we think about the opportunity in technology areas such as Azure, Security and AI, their skills, commitment they've put in place with their teams, evidenced by the level of accreditations they have and dedication to deliver excellent service with both corporate and public sector customers is really what makes them stand out.

Moving on to the final slides. Through our passionate, talented and experienced staff, we're well positioned to continue providing high-quality licensing advice, technical support, service delivery to meet the customer needs, and this will remain our defining USP. Despite the uncertain macroeconomic challenges that we're mindful of, we feel we're structured and motivated to keep growing this business under my new leadership and to continue delivering double-digit growth across our key financial metrics. I want to take this opportunity to thank our hardworking staff for all their efforts over the last year to deliver another set of strong results. Thank you for joining our presentation today. Do we have any questions? I'm going to start with questions in the room first. And if you can just wait until we pass the mic around, and then we can allow the listeners on the call to also hear you.

This is Harvey Robinson from Panmure Gordon. Just a couple of questions from me, if I may. Just on your guidance, it's a bit more specific in this slide pack than it was in the statement, double-digit growth. If we look at last year, obviously, 9% renewal growth or net retention, if you like, from your existing customer base and a few percentage points of new customers. If we were to sort of break it down again on that basis, would that be a good starting point, a higher level from upsell and a small growth in new customers? And then secondly, sort of more market based. Obviously, you are early adopters of Copilot. One of your peer companies, [indiscernible] suggested that he hasn't seen any compelling use cases for Copilot yet. Could you just give us a feel for what people are actually using Copilot for and why they will continue to buy it in large numbers? Just give us a feel.

So Harvey, if I take the Copilot question to start with. We're seeing huge interest levels from our customers. And I think it's relevant to point out that we feel we're at the start of the journey. So it is about understanding use cases. And internally, at Bytes, we've already seen the value. And hence, my disclosure around us rolling it out extensively. I think in terms of meeting capture, summary notes, searching, those are really obvious time gain efficiency case studies that all organizations of any sector could probably point to. But what we're also doing is working down into the vertical use cases across our different industries, and that's part of the journey that we're embarking on with our customers. So at the moment, I would like to say it's early days in terms of getting customers educated and ready. And in the fullness of time, more use cases will become very clear. Andrew, I don't know if you want to talk about the renewal growth.

So Harvey, we have that sort of dual strategy of looking and expanding wallet share within the customer but also the other side of the strategy looking at new customers. And similar to prior years, we see about 2/3 of the growth in GP coming from expansion within our wallet share within current customers and 1/3 coming from new customers. So very similar to the year, numbers exactly 11 million coming, additional million coming from our existing customers and 5 million coming from new customers. So very similar.

It's Harry Read from Redburn Atlantic. Just touching on Copilot again, we got some feedback, I'm just quoting a point from Accenture, saying that only 40% of their clients' workloads are currently in the cloud. Can you talk about just the prerequisite IT stack and the typical conversation with clients? Are people ready to adopt this? Do they have the right security? Do they have the right cloud subscriptions? What's the general kind of state of the IT stack for prerequisite adoption? And then within that, I guess, for a non-tech led enterprise, will the services component increase as a portion of GII. You have to essentially hold hands to get people up to speed on how they can adopt and if they haven't thought about those use cases before.

Harry, what we won't do is go down to SKU product level in terms of our analysis here. We've never done that before. But I think the interesting thing, the work and activities that we're engaging with our customers is exactly what you've talked about. It's the preparedness. It's the data segmentation. It's the analysis around what security they need. So we're running into lots of deep conversation with customers around all those areas. And that does, to your point, stimulate potentially offshoots into other areas of what security as an organization do you want to consider, and that I suppose is the nod back to the 25% GP metric that I talked about earlier. So holistically, it really drives lots of conversations. And to answer the question around services, we're talking about adoption change management, where we have teams in-house to advise and guide our customers in those areas. And beyond that, these are technologies that you can switch on fairly easily once you've got past all of the preparedness stages.

Great. And then maybe just a quick follow-up. Do you think that you have the vendor coverage that you need? Obviously, the kind of the typical IT stack is typically onboarding more vendors on a kind of aggregated basis. Do you think that you have the teams in place and the technical expertise, for instance, if you say I want to adopt CoreWeave cloud as opposed to a hyperscaler or something. That's a very niche example. But do you think you have the vendor coverage that you might not be monetizing at this stage?

At the moment, we feel we're really equipped and structured accordingly. And 25% of our personnel in the business are technical heads, and we'll continue to invest in the areas where we see the customer demand. So at the moment, I'm really confident that we're well positioned.

Rahul from HSBC. I have 2 questions. One for you, Sam. Just in terms of, obviously, the change in the leadership and management, I just wanted to understand from your perspective in terms of strategy and how you're thinking about the business? Should we expect any changes? And I just want to understand your early thoughts from here? Secondly is around investments. Just wanted to understand the thoughts of investments. Are you prepared to continue to maintain head count higher than GP growth given the level of opportunities? And then obviously, you touched upon investment in technical capabilities, but also can you touch upon like how you're thinking about investment in sales as well.

Okay. So on the strategy front, we're really pleased with the results, the double-digit growth that we've just announced, and there will be no deviation from the strategy. It's about consistency. It's about more of the same. And I've worked closely with Jack over the years as the MD of Phoenix to know firsthand what our growth ability is here. And now operating with Andrew, it's going to be a question of fine-tuning some of that strategy. So it really is a case of we're going to continue with some of the key things that I've already talked about. In terms of the head count, again, we'll continue to invest where appropriate on both sales and technical heads, but we're also very committed to internal progression and making sure that people who have careers within our group can actually rise through the ranks. And I think we've probably evidenced that with some of the appointments internally and the announcements we've made. In terms of GP growth, Andrew, I don't know if you want to pick up on that one?

So your question very much in sort of the head count growth about the GP growth is very much in line with our GP growth at 12.5%, head count growth of 13.7%. If you translate into real numbers, it's only 4 or 5 heads. Of the 127 that we brought in this year, 72 in sales, so very much a skewed towards sales still. And just as a reminder, we tend to hire people at an entry level in the sales and grow them into the environment. So what we are betting on is those sales people that we bring in now are productive in year 2 and value contributing in year 3. So we don't see a need to sort of pull the levers to slow down. We haven't seen that in the macroeconomic that we need to slow down hugely.

James Zaremba, Barclays. Obviously, coming out of this kind of high inflationary environment, how much did vendor pricing contribute to growth in FY '24? And I guess, how might that look in FY '25? And then I guess just a follow-up on the leadership change from Rahul. Are there any changes to the process of, I guess, how you're going to kind of conduct stuff versus Neil, who was obviously kind of based in a different part of the country. Now are you going to implement different meetings? Or is it very much the same structure?

So if I take the leadership question first. My style is Sam style. I guess Neil was Neil and I have embarked on spending an awful lot of time within Leatherhead. As you can imagine, out of the 2 operations completely with Phoenix. So I'm devoted to still learning and getting to know more about the Bytes software services team. But having done that now for quite a few months, I feel comfortable, and in terms of cadence of meetings and moving around the country, I was in the Manchester office last week and Reading. So I'm spending a predominant amount of my time now out of the Leatherhead office, and that's where the PLC team is. I don't see that changing in the foreseeable. On to the other questions, I'll let Andrew.

Coming out of COVID-19, a lot of price increases coming through from various vendors, most notably Microsoft, Adobe and so on. And those price increases very much dated back to April 2022. We said at the time that it will take time to flow through, and we're 2 years on. So a lot of those increases have now flown through into our contract base. So I don't expect the sort of inflationary environment to be a tailwind into the future. So that would explain sort of maybe a more normalized sort of low double-digit growth rather than the sort of the high-teens type of environment here.

Maybe one quick follow-up. Your kind of service delivery head count grew quite strongly in the year ahead of, I guess, the actual services revenue itself. Just any comment on why that is and how that might look going forward.

I think we're investing in all the areas that we absolutely need to and it's setting us up great for the future. I haven't got any concerns about that. The complexity of IT and the conversations we're having with our customers requires that specialism within the business. It enables quite a lot of the software sales that we've talked about in the results today. So I'm very pleased with the way we've structured both technical and sales heads.

Andrew Ripper from Liberum. Just a couple from me. Just wanted to come back to customer growth and you had pretty exceptional growth in the prior 2 years going from sort of 5,000 to 6,000. And then in '24, it seems to have leveled off at 6,000. So I wonder if you can elucidate was that a conscious strategy to focus more on sort of growing share of wallet or I'm aware obviously there was some consolidation in the channel of the Microsoft sort of supply chain. Did you get a bit of benefit from that in the prior year and then as sort of the comps are quite tough? Can you shed a bit more color on that?

Yes. I'm happy to take that question. There's nothing to be concerned about, Andrew. Andrew has already mentioned that 2/3 of our GP came from existing customers, 1/3 from new. So we're pleased with that. And I don't think there's much more to add. We've incredibly proud of that split.

And then if you could just talk more broadly about how you see the channel right now? I mean, Bytes had a phenomenal track record, been a big share gainer. What's your sort of perspective on the sort of the health of the market and how sort of competitive positioning within the channel is sort of changing, if at all. Appreciate your share is sort of growing from a relatively low base, and the market is pretty fragmented. How do you see the sort of channel evolving over the next sort of 2 or 3 years and how do you see customers in terms of direct spend versus channel spend going forward?

Well, maybe I can start, and Andrew can chip in. I think it is a competitive market at the moment. But again, I think we're very well positioned in terms of long tenure of staff and long relationships with all of our customers. And that sets us up, I think, for the future in terms of trust and actually the value that customers seek out of a partnership with a channel organization like Bytes Technology Group. In terms of the total addressable market, Andrew, I don't know if you want to comment on that?

We're still very low single digits of total addressable market, albeit if we look at software alone and we're fairly unique in that environment that we have a software offering or 90% of our GP comes from software whereas the bigger players within the VAR community in the U.K. has a more diversified or holistic offering. So I think when we look at this growth in software great, and we've been taking market share, where we're taking market share from is not at the top 10. We're taking market share from the long tail of the other 490 sort of VARs in the country. So I still like the expression, the bigger getting bigger and the smaller are getting niche. And I think that is the approach. Microsoft and other vendors still prefer the smaller vendors to transact through a large vendor. So there's a split of the market of direct CSP, so the cloud solution provider and indirect CSP. So we are both, direct and indirect, meaning that the channel partners. And if everyone recalls the 165 new customers in that FY '23 that we spoke about coming through that channel strategy, and that's adding a number of customers in the background, which we don't measure obviously because we're building the 165 rather than the long tail of niche. So I think that trend will continue. When we look at vendors and a question earlier on sort of new vendors, it's an exciting place to be if you attract -- if you go to the larger VARs, you automatically get access into our 6,000 customers into the other top 10s thousands of customers. So that's the place you want to be the bigger. I think we'll move to questions on the conference line, please.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Alex Nguyen of Jefferies.

I have 2, if I may. The first one would be, I think, your second half '24 exit growth run rate was lower sequentially at around 10%. I want to ask how has 1Q play out for you so far? And how should we think about the trajectory of the growth? I will come back with my second question.

So we don't report on quarters. In terms of the mix in H1 and H2, Andrew, I don't know if you want to take that?

I think, Alex, it's a question that's been cropping up a couple of times and we do see sort of the cycle between H1 and H2 being relatively normal, higher H1 to lower H2. As I said just now, I think the sort of lower double-digit is the way forward, and so we're confident in this year that despite the changes in the sort of the 10% into the second half last year, we're confident in a sort of low double-digit growth for the full year this year.

Then the second question would be around consolidation among the software sector. So last year, we had the VMware and Broadcom deal and then this year we had Cisco and Splunk. Do you have any view on potential future consolidation? And how do you think this consolidation can potentially impact the relationship between the vendors and then the reselling channel?

Okay. In terms of consolidation, the VMware one, I think, is quite unique, but potentially it doesn't impact us. We have the highest accreditation levels. And by default, that means that we're in the right place, working strategically with the vendors, Broadcom and VMware. We have advanced notice of their plans, programmatic changes. We potentially get input into some of the advisory councils around their go-to-market for the future. So if that's the future, I'm pretty confident that by being accredited highly with all of the main players that we are in the right place with them.

[Operator Instructions]. There are no questions coming through. I'm turning back to Jack for webcast questions.

The first question on the webcast comes from Tintin Stormont, Deutsche Numis, and she asks, from your initial engagements with customers on Copilot, is your experience that customers are trying to find new budget for this? Or is your sense that they are looking to make cost savings elsewhere to spend it? And then a second question for Sam. Interested in your observations of the wider business now? Are there some strengths or best practice from Phoenix that the wider group can leverage?

Okay. So on Copilot, Tintin, is it existing budget or is it new budget? The conversations I'm aware of, I think it's a blend of 2. There's a lot of interest, as I mentioned earlier. We've got customer engagement, and we're modeling and we're working with customers and some of them are factoring them into their renewals of agreement. So the answer is a little bit of both and I think each customer will be unique in their ambition and their desire of how fast they want to roll out Copilot. So I don't think there's a singular answer for all customers. It's a combination of the 2. In terms of best practice, I think the 2 organizations, Phoenix, and Bytes, are hugely aligned culturally. We talk a lot about that special formula. Really proud of it across the organization. And I think the 2 organizations are performing really well. So there isn't anything necessarily that I want to change. We have regular meets between the 2 leaders of the business, Clara, Jack, myself and Andrew at a leadership level, and we all share the same ambitions for growth in the future.

The next question comes from Julian Yates from Investec. He asks, one of your case studies included the provision of managed security services. Could you talk a little more around this? What the model is? What you're delivering, and the growth prospects and materiality of this offering.

Okay. Julian, thank you for that question. The provision of security managed service is an interesting one. It's a growth area. It was a new service creation from us as a group, predicated on the Microsoft Sentinel managed service that we started 18 months ago. I'm really pleased with the results and how we are scaling that business. Some of the heads that we spoke about earlier have absolutely been dedicated into that service area. So a combination of new, young people and some very experienced stock analysts have joined our company, and that's allowing us to scale out. In terms of the growth that we have there and its material contribution, Andrew has already spoken about some of the services GP metrics. I don't want to repeat that, but I have a high hope that, that will continue growing into the future, and we're seeing high demand from our customers around those areas.

We have 9 questions from Patrick O'Donnell. I'm going to focus on the ones that I think that haven't been asked yet. So if we have time at the end, we can come back to some of the other ones. So the first question is around M&A and strategic expansion. Are there any new markets or verticals you're looking at that could mean M&A deployment? If so, what would be the key things you would look for in an M&A deal? Any new geographies Bytes wants to start selling into? Or are you happy with the U.K. and Ireland for now?

I'll take that, Andrew. I'll let you have the other 8. As per my reference in the presentation, we're really happy with the organic growth strategy at the moment. For now, we're focused on that. It doesn't mean to say that we don't look at opportunities that come our way. We'll stay open-minded about them as they're presented. But we set a very high bar with the Phoenix acquisition, and we need to make sure that whatever we look at seriously has to culturally align. So for the moment, we're not actively looking to announce anything.

And can you give us some expectation of how the snap U.K. elections might hamper or hinder demand on the public contract side?

Okay. I'll take that and then you've got the other 7. Yes, the news last night, of course, caught a lot of us by surprise, but as a business, we have been through many, many years of elections. It doesn't materially impact what we're doing. To keep the lights on contracts that we are involved in with our customers are not the contracts that under [indiscernible] would be stalled or paused. They're more relevant to large, new, ambitious projects that you might see coming out of Whitehall and so on, where they will put a 6-week hold period on that. And so we're confident that this does not impact our business in coming weeks.

Can you give us a sense of the scope of margin upside in FY '25? And do you expect growth to increase in gross margin in this year versus last year as you upsell to public clients? Should we also expect a shift of corporate clients growth versus public in FY '25 given the U.K. elections?

Difficult one to answer exactly. But if you look at the sort of the turn in FY '22, we focused on that sort of margin expansion and margin being GP/GII. Up until that date, you'd seen sort of a decline over years. And so that was predicated on our efforts around services and around bringing a different mix to our customer base. So what happened in this year is no different. However, we won these big contracts of NHS and HMRC and that sort of artificially reduces that margin. So the focus this year very much like the strategy is wallet share of the customer, how do we achieve that? We put in services, and we put in a product mix within those customer bases, both of those security and services, for argument's sake, at higher margins. So I do expect that it will start reversing the trend. But again, if we win huge new contracts this year, it's going to artificially diluted again, but that land-and-expand contract will start delivering value back into those. And then the answer about the mix, sort of public sector versus corporate sector, both are growth areas, right? So public sector has a different profile as in how we invoice. So you'll see continued growth within that sort of GII number, but those percentages that we showed sort of 35% of our GP coming from public sector, 65% from corporate, I expect those to very much stay in line.

You've touched on this already, but could you comment further on the Bytes and Microsoft relationship? And how you expect that to trend as a percentage of revenue over the coming 12 months? On a longer-term basis, given Microsoft's pivot into AI, could you comment on how Bytes is pivoting to match that change in terms of sales strategy and upskilling? How ready is Bytes to deliver the new Microsoft we are seeing unfolding?

Okay. The Microsoft relationship, I've talked about, it's profoundly important to us. It's core to our strategy. It drives and attracts a lot of the other vendor complementary relationships as well. So I think we're perfectly aligned at senior executive level all the way down into the teams that we work intimately with. In terms of pivoting closer around AI as a business, all our sellers are very comfortable with the narrative around Copilot and will be confident in its use as we deploy it extensively across the business. In terms of upskilling around that, we've already put the right skills into the business technically. We have teams that are AI competent. We have generative AI skills and all of that supports our conversations with our customers. So at the moment, I think we're structured absolutely fine for this conversation. And as we move into the year, I think that we're strategically aligned very nicely to the Microsoft narrative.

Final one from Patrick. How important can Copilot and other AI products be for Bytes in FY '25? Can you detail when these products will meaningfully alter growth? And how do you think about AI use cases outside of Copilot? What other vendors are you working with to implement AI solutions for your client base?

I think we've already covered some of that of in the use cases. We will follow in due course. There's a whole array of vendors in our portfolio and I'm struggling to think of one that hasn't got AI. That's part of their strapline or their go to market. So I think it's a whole industry phenomenon and a new era that we're embarking on. I don't particularly want to single out any one vendor. I think you've only got to read the press and you've just got to listen to some of the narrative on social, everybody is leaning in and everybody's pivoting fast. And as I say, this is a whole new journey for everybody, Bytes and vendors included.

And the final question on the webcast comes from James Britton at HSBC. He asks, can you please remind us how end of support for Windows 10 is impacting your engagement with customers currently? And what financial implications can we expect for 2025 and 2026?

I think a lot of that engagement has already taken place and customers have committed and it's part of the annuity contracts that we're just rolling from year-to-year. So I think it's already been catered for and built in. It's not particularly driving any uptick. It's momentum of contract renewals. Andrew, would you put any other thoughts on that?

I would agree with that. If you look at the public sector space, maybe included within the SKUs and the enterprise agreements, the corporate sector space tend to buy the Windows application alongside the hardware. So if your hardware is not capable of driving Windows 11 or Windows 12, then you would possibly have to replace hardware. But because we've got a smaller focus on hardware, I don't think that's going to be a driver for us this year.

Okay. With that, I'll hand back to Sam.

Thank you. I think that concludes our Q&A. And I'd just like to thank everybody that's joined us today, and look forward to seeing you all again soon in the future. Thank you.