18th Mar 2026 08:40
(Alliance News) - Softcat PLC on Wednesday lifted its yearly profit guidance, after a first half that beat expectations.
The Buckinghamshire, England-based provider of IT infrastructure products said pretax profit in the half-year to January 31 shot up 15% to GBP88.2 million from GBP76.7 million a year prior.
Revenue surged 54% on-year to GBP837.5 million from GBP545.6 million.
Underlying operating profit pushed 27% higher to GBP93.8 million from GBP73.7 million and for the full-year, Softcat now expects high single-digit growth, its forecast raised from low-single digits. In financial 2025, underlying operating profit amounted to GBP180.1 million.
Softcat shares rose 7.6% to 1,237.00 pence each in London on Wednesday morning, the best FTSE 250 performer.
"Softcat delivered terrific progress in the first half, with growth in gross profit and underlying operating profit well ahead of expectations alongside excellent cash generation. This reflects the benefits of ongoing investment in our offering over the past few years, as well as sharp execution during the current period, and the benefits we are seeing on customer demand for AI enabled infrastructure and our own operational transformation," Chief Executive Officer Graham Charlton said.
"AI is reshaping customer priorities at pace, and organisations of all sizes are now prioritising the building of the data, infrastructure and security foundations needed to deploy it effectively and at scale. Given the breadth of our offering, these trends play directly to our strengths, with AI increasing customer demand across storage and compute, through the network and onto devices, as well as creating the need for greater security and governance."
In April of last year, the firm announced the acquisition of data and AI consultancy services firm, Oakland Group Services Ltd.
CEO Charlton said the firm is "further benefitting from the acquisition of Oakland".
Softcat raised its interim dividend by 11% to 9.9 pence per share from 8.9p.
"Our capital allocation policy remains unchanged, prioritising long-term investment in organic growth to facilitate further share gains in our expanding addressable market; secondly to maintain a progressive ordinary dividend. Remaining excess capital is then either allocated to compelling strategic investments, which could include bolt-on acquisitions to expand our portfolio offering or international expansion, or is returned to shareholders," Softcat said.
By Eric Cunha, Alliance News news editor
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