Equanet delivers sales/profits growth

Equanet, the privately held corporate reseller, increased sales and profitability by nearly half for the year to June 30.

The Chessington, Surrey-based reseller said sales were £41.4 million (£28.5 million) and profit before tax would come in at around £1 million. The results are unaudited.

Gross margins improved by 0.5 per cent over the year, against a background of falling margins in the industry, chairman Jonathan Chapple. Equanet had achieved this because of "increasing customer confidence as the company gets bigger," he said.

"Customers are unsettled by all the mergers and takeovers in the channel. At a time of great volatility and upheaval, we can provide some comfort. Equanet has had consistent ownership and delivered consistent growth."

Sales growth was helped by a “pretty buoyant market”. Equanet had also grown faster than the market, he said. "We are still terribly small - perhaps number 15 in the market. The only way to grow is to be more efficient - to do better than our competitors.”

The company has installed an in-house developed system that improves sales floor productivity by more than a third, according to Chapple. The system aggregates price and stock information from six distributors, greatly reducing the time that salespeople spend in gathering material to produce customer quotes. ®