Bytes Technology Group H2 2026 Earnings Report

Bytes Technology Group EPS Results

• Actual EPS: GBX 21.40
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

Bytes Technology Group Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $220.56 million
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

Bytes Technology Group Announcement Details

• Quarter: H2 2026
• Date: 5/12/2026
• Time: Before Market Opens
• Conference Call Date: Tuesday, May 12, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 4:00AM ET

With a 40-year track record, Bytes Technology Group (LON:BYIT) is one of the UK and Ireland’s leading software, security, AI and cloud services specialists. We enable effective and cost-efficient technology sourcing, adoption and management across software, security, hardware, and AI and cloud services. Our strong relationships with many of the world’s largest software companies enable our specialist staff to deliver the latest technology to a diverse and embedded customer base. This has resulted in our long track record of strong financial performance. Learn more at Bytesplc.com

Bytes Technology Group H2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Bytes said it enters FY2027 with good sales momentum and expects high single-digit to low double-digit gross profit growth, with H1 likely stronger than H2.
• Neutral Sentiment: FY2026 gross income rose 11.5% and gross profit increased 2.5% to GBP 167.3 million, but operating profit fell 4.6% to GBP 62.7 million due to Microsoft incentive changes and continued investment.
• Positive Sentiment: The company highlighted strong cash generation with cash conversion of 105% and ended the year debt-free with GBP 98.6 million of cash after returning GBP 74 million to shareholders.
• Neutral Sentiment: Microsoft incentive changes were a major headwind in FY2026, reducing margin and holding back growth in the first half, though management said the impact is now annualized and growth improved in H2.
• Positive Sentiment: Bytes emphasized its strategic shift toward services, AI, cloud, and cybersecurity, noting services gross profit grew 38% and that it is seeing demand for higher-value advisory, implementation, and managed services.

Presentation

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Okay. Good morning, and welcome to Bytes Technology Group, our full year 2026 financial results. I'm Sam Mudd, the CEO, and I'm joined today by Andrew, our CFO. I'm going to begin with a quick introduction to the business for those of you that are new to us, and then I'll hand over to Andrew who'll provide the financial review, and then he'll be handing back to me for the full business review. Bytes Technology Group is one of the largest providers of software solutions in the world, and we operate under two brands, both of which have a rich heritage in their markets. Bytes focuses on the private sector, and Phoenix focuses on the public sector. We have a huge diversified customer base, and we have more than 200 vendors that we represent, with Microsoft being one of our most strategic.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

On the right, you can see that we've been delivering strong growth over the last year or so, and we have good cash conversion and consistent capital returns to shareholders over the last five years since IPO. Looking at today's highlights and starting on the left-hand side, firstly, we've made good strategic progress and implemented intentional organizational change and improvements which were needed to expand our services and streamline our customer focus. We believe these enhancements will drive our growth and enable us to stay ahead of the wider transitions that we're seeing in our industry today. More on that later. Suffice to say, we will continue to evolve as an organization as the landscape changes. Secondly, we have delivered good cash conversion and consistent capital returns of GBP 74 million to shareholders in the last year.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

We're confident that despite growth being temporarily impacted in H1, H2 has showed movement back to recovery, including strong growth with Microsoft as we annualize the incentive changes. Thirdly, the full year 2027 momentum. We enter the new financial year with good sales momentum and expect to return to high single-digit to low double-digit gross profit growth. The sector alignment is progressing well, and the teams that are moving are looking forward to being a part of the dedicated businesses and focused on their respective sectors. Now let me hand over to Andrew, who'll give you the full details on the numbers.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

Thanks, Sam. Good morning to everyone. I just want to apologize for my head cold and for those that are on the webcast. I didn't greet anyone by hand, so hopefully I haven't spread it further. Thank you for joining the presentation. Our headline numbers, we increased gross income or GII by 11.5%, driven by software and services sales. Gross profit grew 2.5% to GBP 167.3 million, impacted by the Microsoft incentive changes as well as the segmentation in our private sector sales teams. Operating profit of GBP 62.7 million was 4.6% lower than in the prior year. However, in line with our guidance from October. This reflected both the lower-than-planned gross profit growth and the ongoing investment into our future.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

We will provide more detail on the next slide. We have a strong financial position with cash conversion remaining above 100%. We've also delivered further growth in our returns to shareholders with a 2% increase in ordinary dividends together with a share buyback program completed in November of 2025, bringing back the total cash return to shareholders to GBP 74 million. Our net customer numbers were broadly stable year-on-year, resulting in a 2.4% increase in GP per customer. This comprised new customers contributing around GBP 5 million to GP and a renewal rate of 99% from existing customers. Starting with the headline numbers. Gross invoice income, GII, grew by 11.5%, with public and private sectors growing broadly in line with each other.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

Gross profit or GP growth of 2.5% comprised of public sector growth of 7.4% and private sector decline of 0.3%. GP over GII this year was 7.1%, a reduction of 0.7% from the prior year. This reduction reflects the impact of the Microsoft incentive changes effective from January of 2025. Microsoft remains our largest vendor and continues to contribute 50% of our GP. The incentive changes that impacted us impacted the private and public sectors differently. Enterprises remain the primary program used to fulfill the Microsoft public sector requirements. As we invoice the customers, the reduction in incentives did not impact the GII, but reduces our GP. For the private sector, enterprise agreements are recognized only in the rebate. Therefore, our GP to GII remains at 100%.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

Part of the mitigation for the reduction of incentives is to move our customers to a Microsoft CSP program. On a like-for-like basis, we make more gross profit, but as we now invoice the customer, our GP to GII margin reduces. I have given detail on the administrative costs, which increased 8.5%, to highlight some of the key changes in our cost base and to help with your modeling. Salary costs increased 17% year-on-year, driven by headcount growth, and this includes strengthening of our senior leadership roles and annual wage increases. Average headcount growth was 12%. Over 40% was annualized hires made in FY 2025, with less hiring this year. We capitalized GBP 1.8 million of our employee cost in relation to our project to modernize some of our IT systems.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

In FY 2027, this GBP 1.8 million of employee cost will be expensed now that the projects are complete. Commissions and bonuses are down 0.4%. Within this, commissions have trended broadly in line with GP growth, with bonuses which are driven by targets reducing. In FY 2027, we expect bonuses to be just over GBP 2 million higher based on our full year guidance. Social security costs are up 20% due to the increased national insurance contributions effective from April 2025, which has now been annualized. Share-based payments are down 85% due to lower profitability, impacting the level of vesting of our performance share plans. We would expect share-based payments to be around GBP 1 million for FY 2027.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

Other administrative expenses increased 23%, driven by investment in systems to improve employee and customer experience, travel and entertainment as we encouraged our teams to connect in person with both our customers and our vendors. In FY 2027, amortization will increase from the development of our IT systems, which we've developed over the last two years. With this last component, in addition to the returning developer salary costs and higher bonuses, we expect 4.5% of cost normalization in FY 2027. Turning to our income analysis. On the left, we see GII and GP for the full year split by both our service types as well as public-private sectors. The public sector GP growth rate was ahead of the private sector, where the realignment of the sales resulted in an adjustment period in H1. Momentum improved in H2, however, against the tougher comparator.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

In the public sector, GP was more heavily impacted in H1 by the Microsoft incentive changes, H1 being the peak of the Microsoft renewal period. Growth rebounded in H2. Microsoft incentive changes resulted in a lower software GP growth in GII. Microsoft GP returned to double-digit growth in H2 and remains around 50% of the group. Services grew strongly on the top and the bottom line, driven by continued investment in our offering and strong customer demand. The services margin was driven by both mix and cost efficiencies. OP to GP margin was higher in H1 than in H2 during due to higher commissions rates in H2. These one sales targets are exceeded and also headcounts phasing. Turning now to our cash flow bridge.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

We capitalized GBP 4.1 million of software development costs in the year, and this relates to the two IT platforms. One, to provide a marketplace gateway for our customers so that they can seamlessly purchase products online from a range of our vendors. The other is to enable us to improve our operational processes around customer order processing. The marketplace platform is now complete with a cumulative CapEx of GBP 3.4 million. We started amortizing it in H2, FY 2026 at an annualized rate of GBP 0.4 million. The second platform is expected to go live earlier this year. The combined asset, GBP 7.6 million at year-end, and this results in an annualized amortization of around GBP 1 million. Our cash conversion continues to follow the same cycle that we've discussed in the past.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

As a reminder, we tend to see lower cash conversion in H1, followed by a very strong cash conversion in the second. For the full year, using operating profit as our denominator, we had a cash conversion of 105%. After tax and returning GBP 74 million to our shareholders, we are left with a cash balance of GBP 98.6 million at year-end. Looking towards our balance sheet, this I hope will provide more context of how we think about our cash balance. We look to maintain a strong balance sheet for 2 reasons. Firstly, large gross payable balances at year-end are inherent in our business models, and working capital outflows in H1 align to our seasonality around GII due to the Microsoft and public sector year-ends.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

Secondly, we operate in a negative capital environment, which was around GBP 80 million at year-end. Taking both of these into account, we seek to remain a relatively strong level of cash on our balance sheet and remain debt-free. Moving on to a reminder of how we think about allocating our capital for maximizing value creation to our shareholders. Sam will pick up more on the first point here in a moment, but in summary, there's a strong market growth for the software solutions that we sell. Investing in our organic growth through sales and technical people in order to drive customer growth remains our key priority. We are committed to returning between 40%-50% of our post-tax adjusted profits to shareholders via ordinary dividends.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

I'm therefore pleased to announce that the board has approved a final dividend of GBP 0.07 per share, bringing the full year dividend to GBP 0.102. That represents a 2% increase on FY 2025. Selective value accretive M&A remains an opportunity in our industry. We are actively monitoring opportunities, but are yet to find something that ticks our strategic quality and valuation criteria. Finally, we return excess cash back to our shareholders. In FY 2026, we completed a GBP 25 million share buyback and are launching a new GBP 25 million buyback today. This while maintaining our working capital requirements. With that, I'll hand back to Sam.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Thank you, Andrew. I want to start by taking a step back and highlight the strong growth market that we're in and why. Firstly, we have only 3% share of a large GBP 82 billion addressable market in the U.K. software solutions across both the private and the public sector. There's a significant opportunity to grow our footprint with our existing customers as well as winning new ones. Secondly, the overall market is growing strongly. The solutions we sell meet four key areas of structural growth: AI, cloud, cyber, and services. These drivers all interlink. Our customers want to reshape their businesses with AI, and they need their data and their applications in the cloud to do so, and this is often increasing their cyber attack surface.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

All of this, adopting AI, modernizing, and securing infrastructure to do so requires more specialist services and experience than ever before. Thirdly, one of our significant growth opportunities and drivers is Microsoft, who remain our largest vendor at 50% gross profit and remain a strategic partner. They're constantly a cornerstone of IT budgets, and this creates a key gateway for us connecting to organizations on their wider technology investments, which in turn supports our growth with other vendors. Let me turn to our strategic pillars and how they enable us to capture and drive our organic growth. We have three key levers of growth: our people, our vendors, and our customers, and the propositions that we build from all of these. We're a sales-focused business, and our people drive our sales.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

We have a highly engaged, well-incentivized team who put our customers first and are accountable for their experience with us. We also drive our growth by being a trusted and valued partner to our vendors, and we turn our vendor partners' technologies into wider solutions. The vendors want us to make their technologies relevant and importantly sticky for customers because this drives consumption, and this is becoming the dominant revenue mechanism for many of them. The way we do this is through services. Importantly, this trust and ability earns vendor investments in our business and for us to initiate customer activity into new technology areas. Finally, we aim to bring our people and vendor strategies together in the most customer-centric way possible. We increasingly organize how different customers actually buy and what they specifically need. We organize ourselves around that.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

This is so that we can provide them with the best mix of support and solutions which are tailored to their needs by their size and their sector. Trust, value, choice, and service remain key to our customers and also our ongoing focus. The industry that we're operating in has substantially changed and evolved over the last few years. If I think back to my three decades in the industry, change has been a constant. There are broadly three transformations ongoing which all create opportunity. Firstly, the way that customers pay for their software continues to move from per-seat licensing to consumption. The shift started with the growth of cloud and customers buying compute and storage and based on activity levels, not headcount anymore. This is only increasing with AI and token usage being brought out to market.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

It makes it more important than ever to help customers get value from the solutions that they buy. This is also increasing the monetary investment that vendors are giving partners to support adoption and consumption. Secondly, customer demand continues to shift from wanting specific point products to whole solutions. This is driven by increasing complexity of modern IT. The customers need their IT estate to be secure, cost optimized, and integrated. This leads to them increasingly needing scalable solutions from us, which are more economic, safer to deploy, and easier to operate than individual point products. This in turn increases the growth potential for those that can advise, integrate, manage, and deliver business outcomes for those customers. Finally, these changes together create a shift where customers and vendors need deeper relationships with us. Rather than being seen as a reseller, we're now seen as a partner.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

These industry changes do not impact our structural growth opportunity, but they do drive a need for us to evolve in order to stay aligned and be able to capture growth in the medium term. This year, we have implemented strategic changes to align to these transitions. Firstly, customer-led segmentation. Back in March 2025, at the start of the year, we reorganized our Bytes private sector sales teams from a single generalist structure to specialist teams. We segmented customers by their organization size based on their number of seats into enterprise, corporate, and midmarket. Our technical specialists moved into the same customer segments as sales. The rationale is that private sector customers need different things from us if they are small versus if they are a large organization. Vendor incentives are structured differently too accordingly to size.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

This change will enable us to be a better seller and drive growth to customers as the industry evolves. As Andrew has already set out, the impacted GP growth in our private sector business in H1 was impacted, but it stabilized in H2, and the effects of the changes have settled into the business, and the sales pipeline has returned to normal in H2. In FY 2027, we move forward with a clean comparator. Moving to services-led capability, services GP grew 38% this year. We're growing in three broad areas. Firstly, using customer vendor investment to help customers deploy and adopt. Secondly, providing managed services to support the customer through the life cycle. Thirdly, we're expanding services in our portfolio to ensure we can deliver integrated solutions around AI. Lastly, the sector led go-to-market change announced in March 2026.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

We commenced this small change where we'll remove the market overlap between our two businesses to make each business a pure play in their sector. A small number of account managers will move within the group, but customer relationships will be unaffected. Bytes will focus solely on the private sector, and Phoenix will focus solely on the public sector. This will further strengthen their ability to deliver full customized, focused solutions and services and allow deeper collaboration on shared services and vendor partnerships. Our people are our core asset, and I'm proud of their energy, enthusiasm, and commitment. We increased headcount 7% year-on-year, and that set our average headcount increased 12% following the strong H2 growth of last year. This measured investment was focused on sales staff to drive future growth and technical delivery staff to meet the needs of services demand.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Within this, we've added new practice leads to ensure we build depth as well as breadth. We fitted out the first of two buildings acquired in FY 2025. This adds capacity to existing modern and inviting workspaces. We have plans to expand our London footprint in FY 2027. Our culture and engagement remains strong. Our eNPS increased to 62, up from 57. We were placed 14th in the FT's U.K. Best Employers ranking, the highest in our sector. We increased the number of GBP 1 million GP sellers. Having just spoken about our continued investment in sales and the increase of the GBP 1 million GP sellers, I want to illustrate why we make that investment. You'll see on this slide the maturity profile for successful sellers in the business. I presented it here as steps because that's how we coach sellers in the business.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Sales staff retention also grows with maturity, which is equally important. This remains incredibly high amongst our top sellers. Our new sellers open the door in a number of ways, such as our Microsoft expertise, our licensing pedigree, and increasingly our services capability. They expand from this with additional solutions from Microsoft and other vendors as they gain trust and learn more about the customer environments. This is an iterative process as our customer requirements are so broad, and there are always additional opportunities to go after. As I mentioned, our job is to turn our vendor partner technologies into solutions, and we work closely with them to do so. Microsoft remains our largest vendor and our most strategic partner. It's the cornerstone of our customer budgets. It's also the gateway to the majority of their technology decisions.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Covering all Microsoft bases supports our growth with other vendors, but more importantly, it helps us drive value for our customers. We often support collaboration within their organizations where many silos might exist. I'm delighted the relationship goes from strength to strength. I just got back from visiting the HQ in Seattle only two weeks ago. Our Microsoft GII grew at 11.5% year-on-year at both across the private and the public sector. In H2, Microsoft GP returned to double-digit growth with incentive changes absorbed. Where Microsoft is investing, we are delivering. Our Microsoft services around pre-sales advisory, implementation, and adoption increased 31%. We've also deepened our relationship with other key vendors this year. We continue to see growth with AWS in cloud, Flexera in optimization, SentinelOne in cyber, and Rubrik and VMware in the hybrid infrastructure space.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

I'm now going to show you a clip of a discussion I had with Microsoft's U.K. and Ireland channel lead, around our partnership, Nick Hedderman. Just before we press the start button, a little fun fact for you. Nick Hedderman, he presides over the entire U.K. channel ecosystem and used to be Steve Ballmer's demo buddy. Steve liked working with Nick so much, he decided to take him on a tour around the world that lasted many, many years, until Steve lost his job, and then Nick had to come back to the U.K. and find a different role. We work tremendously well with Nick. On that note, I'd like to just share a brief snip of the video.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

There is a longer version of this that we'll provide the link to you with as well. Thank you. I'm Sam Mudd, the CEO of Bytes Technology Group, and I'm delighted to be with Nick Hedderman today, who is the Microsoft U.K. and Ireland channel lead. We have been thriving with Microsoft as a partner, growing over a 40-year period, and I'm so excited about the era that we're entering now around AI. It's reminiscent of the internet era, which, as we all know, was a point in time where pervasive computing started to drive whole new work patterns.

[Nick Hedderman, UK and Ireland Channel Lead at Microsoft]

We have this program called the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, which is very rich and has a number of different capabilities within it, from solution designations and specializations, right the way through to partner programs that we can collectively take to our joint customers, to really help those customers to accelerate their technology usage and adoption. I know that you're capable at leveraging those programs and plenty of great examples, and maybe you can share some of them.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Yeah. No. We use that funding to really take customer to the next level of either envisioning or seeing the art of the possible, of technology and what it can do to drive the benefits back into their business so that their utilization of the features, the functionality, are elevated to the next level. That comes back to, you know, customers that might have a license, or they might have bought into a technology, but they're not truly using it to its full potential. That funding drives it to that level.

[Nick Hedderman, UK and Ireland Channel Lead at Microsoft]

Yeah.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Nick, as I think about, you know, the 40 years journey we've been on, I just want to thank, because I think the growth ambition that Microsoft have had, you know, has certainly been part of our ambition, and we've in parallel gone on this journey. It's not just a Microsoft conversation all the time, is it? I know you know, you have some thoughts around that.

[Nick Hedderman, UK and Ireland Channel Lead at Microsoft]

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think you do a very good job of using the Microsoft platform as a starting point with all of your customers. In certain customer situations, there may be additional third-party technologies. That are required to complement that.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Yeah.

[Nick Hedderman, UK and Ireland Channel Lead at Microsoft]

You not only have the capability to lead with Microsoft technologies, but also think about the complementary technologies from third parties that you could bring into the conversation.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Yeah, I think Microsoft, you know, their maturity of embracing that wider ecosystem and involving them in conversations and co-sell motions, again, you are absolutely outstanding at driving that. Our sellers, you know, embrace it, and again, it's part of the reality of the complex world of IT that we're all operating in, right?

[Nick Hedderman, UK and Ireland Channel Lead at Microsoft]

One of the really cool things that will happen more and more now in this new agentic era is some of the technologies you may be building for yourself internally may end up becoming IP that you.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Yeah, for sure.

[Nick Hedderman, UK and Ireland Channel Lead at Microsoft]

Have put into our marketplace, and we take to customers together.

[Nick Hedderman, UK and Ireland Channel Lead at Microsoft]

That ecosystem of some of the third-party solutions that complement Microsoft technologies may, over time, be coming from you directly, which is really quite a nice thought as a, as we go forward.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Absolutely. A small segment of the bigger video. I'd like to now talk about our services and where they come into the technology life cycle and where we partner with vendors to provide those services. Pre-sales, we provide advisory to identify gaps and opportunities which help customers shape decisions before they buy. A great example is the cybersecurity space, where our customers are currently trying to answer two questions. One, how do we adopt AI safely? Two, how do we actually trust our environments? We offer governance, risk, and compliance assessments to help them answer those two questions and create priorities for their security position. We help them design and deliver the solutions, which means from a delivery point of view, helping customers deploy and adopt the solution which drives the consumption.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Post-sales, we can provide the support around customer solutions or even manage them, and these services are often the linchpin in helping customers achieve their desired business outcomes. This is what sits behind the 38% services GP growth that we've reported. It's just not one thing. It's our capability across the technology life cycle. Roughly one-third of those services are pre-sales professional services, which are project based, and two-thirds are post-sales managed services and reoccurring. I want to talk a little bit about AI now. The fact that AI will drive growth across all of our customer technology spending, and we're well positioned to benefit from that. We're seeing the start of these trends already. AI drives our customers to need cloud infrastructure for compute, storage and governance for data, and networking and connectivity for access, and this all needs to be secured.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

I'll talk about how we bring all of this together on the next slide. Importantly, this need for an integrated solution means that we are positioned well as a major Microsoft partner with Frontier status with deep services capability. Many of our customers have the compliance, the identity and access, and the security foundations for AI in their existing Microsoft state, so our existing relationship with them around Microsoft is often the start of that AI journey and expansion. Our work with the NHS is a prime example of how we're expanding an existing customer on AI and how the market changes. I mentioned earlier that we have become more customer centric, providing more services to deliver wider solutions at scale to win more business like this. We work with a number of NHS trusts across the U.K.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Their technology needs are becoming more complex. By having more specialist sales teams focused on the public sector and on healthcare, this allows us to support them in that complexity. In 2025, we partnered with NHS England to deliver over 80 tailored workshops to a range of NHS trusts and to inform and assess their AI use case opportunities. This has led to the largest global Microsoft-funded rollout, where we are helping them with envisioning, deployment, and adoption of Copilot to several hundred thousand employees in 2026. Having a more specialist customer-centric sales team that understands our customer needs, it makes us as a partner, deliver the services and solutions and not just simply be a reseller around point products. This is what our clients need more and more from us in the AI era.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

The complexity of AI adoption, the governance, the integration, the data readiness, the security considerations, is precisely the kind of complexity our customers pay us to navigate. This slide outlines the different aspects of what we provide on AI. The mistake we see repeatedly in the market is organizations chasing AI outcomes without the foundations to run them safely, secure them, or realize the value. When a customer is faced with a challenge like deploying a secure AI-driven agentic solution, this isn't just an AI task, it cuts across multiple disciplines, and it is where a collaborative cross-practice approach to create one solution really matters. We follow a simple life cycle of advise, build, and secure. We advise customers on where AI can create the business value.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

We build scalable production-grade platforms, not just proof of concepts that stall, and we secure it by design, embedding governance, risk, and compliance from day one. Around that core, our AI practice consultants, they design the models, the agents, and the workflows. The infrastructure consultants build the landing zones and the platforms that they run on. The cloud and security and governance risk and compliance teams ensure that this is safeguarded for trust, compliance, and resilience. Adoption and change management training makes sure the value actually lands with the users. This result is repeatable, enterprise-grade AI delivery aligned to Microsoft's Frontier firm vision, trusted by customers, and scalable as the demand accelerates. To summarize, I've outlined how we're well-positioned to take advantage of the growing IT market, especially as AI becomes more ubiquitous across businesses today.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

We carried out our strategic changes with the private sector change bedding in during H2 and now beginning to show clear positive results. The Microsoft incentive changes are now annualized, and our partnership continues to offer a gateway to new vendors. In FY 2027, we expect gross profit growth of high single digit to low double digit. Operating profit we expect to be broadly flat, absorbing the approximate GBP 4.5 million of cost normalization we discussed earlier. Medium term, our ambition is unchanged. We want to expand our wallet share with customers, capture the structural demand in our market. Finally, I want to touch on the announced board and executive committee changes. The board has decided to split the currently combined roles of CFO and COO, held by Andrew, to support our next phase of growth.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Andrew will be standing down as CFO once a suitable replacement has been appointed, at which date he will step down from the board. Thereafter, he will remain in the group and transition into the COO role. I'm grateful for Andrew's five-year contribution as CFO to the group and board member, and we're pleased that we will be retaining his long-standing knowledge into the business and his deep operational experience. Thank you. We'll take some questions now. Tintin, your hand couldn't have gone up any faster.

[Tintin Stormont, Analyst at Deutsche Numis]

Morning, guys. I'm Tintin Stormont from Deutsche Numis. Couple of questions from me. In terms of your services portfolio, what is the market for potential bolt-on M&A in terms of your services gaps that you're looking at? Is the intention to sort of, kinda partner, work with existing partners and maybe choose from that sort of, kinda range of partners you have? Secondly, in terms of the non-Microsoft vendors, obviously with Microsoft having grown double-digit in the second half and overall second half GP growth being closer to 5%, the non-Microsoft vendors obviously perform closer to flat. Clearly, there's the pull-forward impact from last year that's probably not flattering those numbers. If you could give us a sense of the underlying performance of the other non-Microsoft vendors if you remove that impact.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Sure. Okay. Let me talk a little bit about M&A. I think, you know, we've been very transparent around the fact that we're selective and very careful about any potential candidates we might consider, and we've been active over the last years thinking about how we accelerate on organic services capability. So let me be clear. We think about the core areas that I've referred to throughout this presentation, security, AI, and cloud as being those core areas that our customers are creating demand for services around. We consider ongoing investment and that continues with technical heads coming into the business, the practice leads that I've talked about, and obviously, dedicating ourselves around the Microsoft Frontier Partner Program and other vendor initiatives such as the Broadcom Pinnacle area where we've got capability.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

We look at the partner ecosystem, and to your point, Tintin, the partners we work with, where you have obviously proximity and familiarity and trustworthiness in terms of their capability. For sure, that's a community we preside over and we work with closely, you know, as well as providing our own direct services. Yes, that's a certainly a community of potential targets and, you know, we think about the most important attribute is would it fit into the portfolio and, you know, give us that acceleration and secondly, cultural fit. That's probably in fact the primary piece of consideration. When you think about the last acquisition was Phoenix into the group, highly successful, and great fit.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

We will be looking for something that is adjacent to our core capabilities and that would, at a cultural level, come in and be additive, not a distraction. I think that answers that question. In terms of Microsoft growth and non-Microsoft vendors, you're right. The pull forward in FY 2025 was clearly one of the reasons why the non-Microsoft vendors didn't perform as strongly. I think there's also another explanation. When we moved into the mitigation era around Microsoft incentive changes, on the private sector side, we had the big push around EA to CSP conversion, and that required an awful lot of dedicated management time intentionality. We know that that, you know, for that period of time, probably the first half of FY 2026 meant the attention came off the non-Microsoft vendors.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

I think that's the other explanation as well as the pull forward. We resumed business as usual back into H2, and I'm delighted to see that momentum and, you know, a lot of the awards and accolades and the growth get back to what we would expect for non-Microsoft vendors. It's a really key part of our strategy, Tintin. It's not an area we want to neglect and I hope a lot of the presentation today spoke about the cross-fertilization of if you're deep with Microsoft, it does enable you to have those other additive conversations with other vendors and co-sell. Marketplace, of course, is another route to market to bring in those non-Microsoft vendor discussions. I think Julian.

[Analyst]

Thank you. Just a couple of questions from me. On the services GP, up 38%, do you have what that was in public and private? I assume it's dominated by public, but just be interesting to know. The second one is more sort of a broader question, following on a little bit from Tintin in the sense of, you've got breadth of complexity, or breadth of domain capabilities, that your customers have a much more complex market, as you alluded to. Do you have all the capabilities in place that you require? You should be taking market share versus many of your peers, do you have a wish list of maybe other capabilities to add into that beyond Tintin sort of services question? I'm sort of thinking vendors, hardware, other capabilities, or in fact, any other restructuring within the business you need to do to maximize your position.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Okay. I'll come to the last point, other restructure. You know, everything that we've talked about has been very considered and there are no other changes being planned. To come back to the services growth, we don't provide detailed guidance on the sectors. I think, conversationally, we've always been open about the fact that public sector has high demand for partners like Phoenix, Bytes and lean into us where we have capability and we've got talent. There has been an exodus of key technical skills from public sector over the last five plus years, which means that they're struggling to keep up with accreditations and move as fast as the industry pace is shifting at the moment.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

We have seen good demand from public sector, equally, we're seeing, you know, some very positive signs and great momentum in private. It isn't all about one sector. In terms of domain capabilities, have we got it all in place? No. If you think about a matrix of skills across both of our operations, there are gaps, and that's exactly where we look for M&A to potentially fill, accelerate, and to bring new capability into the portfolio.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

We know there are areas where we're not completely staffed up within our own internal capability, but we also have a very rich partner ecosystem. Back to Tintin's point, we've partnered magnificently with other vendor partners, and over the years, that's been something we're very proud of. That supplements at the moment. As you can imagine, the strategy is bringing more and more in-house in terms of building up our capability, and those practice teams are getting larger to address the demand.

[Analyst]

In terms of sort of building up that capability and beyond the services, would you look to other areas of customer attention such as hardware or other vendors?

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

When it comes to that.

[Analyst]

It'd just be interesting in terms of the thoughts, longer term because of your breadth of specialism is what customers are looking for, as you said.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

No, it's a good observation, Julian. Of course, hardware, as we all know, at the moment is in a precarious There's demand, but the actual fulfillment and the delays and the invoicing and the peaky sort of troughs, you know, are something our peers are having to deal with. It's an area that we do participate in. We have got some hardware sales. We have partnerships with the likes of Dell. We're a Titanium partner and Lenovo and others. We actually go about it with strategic intent. We tend not to bid for large scale laptop refresh. Kind of, it's low margin. We're not engineered or built that way.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Where we're engaged with the customer on a project and a whole transformation, we've worked very well with the hardware vendors to ring-fence deal register of projects. More server capability is what I'm talking about. We also have some managed service contracts which are hardware orientated. It's not that we lack the ability, it's just I think we respect our heritage has always been software solutions. It's what our USP has been. It's what our sales staff are, you know, confident to talk about. Could we and would we ever go further into the hardware market? It's something we do routinely think about when we come back to sitting down and talking about strategy with the two operations, it's never off the table. At this moment in time, it's not a core theme for us.

[Analyst]

Morning. It's Andrew from Panmure Gordon. I've got a couple as well, if that's okay. First one on guidance and thinking about GP growth for this year. I wonder whether you think it'll be H1 weighted, when you talk about momentum having been strong year to date, are you growing double digits today? Then I've got a couple more on AI after that one.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

I'm gonna let Andrew take that so I can blow my nose.

[Analyst]

Also, Andrew, actually supplemental on that. The last few years, you know, we've seen the GP margin as percentage of GII come down. Do you think this year it'll be sort of more similar in terms of GP, GII growth rate?

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

Andrew, a very interesting question. I think the growth rate will be slightly weighted towards H1, and this is particularly because of the Microsoft year-end and our public sector focus, and therefore we think public sector will continue and the trends that we've seen in the past is maybe higher than the private sector growth. We see that it's not maybe 2%-2.5% difference from the growth rates. What you end up with in a modeling point of view is probably more 50/50 on the GP basis. When you look at the call it the GP over GII.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

That's quite a complex question, but I'll try and simplify the answer, is that because our public sector is very much dominated by enterprise agreements, so the more we grow in the public sector space, it looks like it appears that our GP is shrinking just because we're invoicing one and taking a rather small margin. What I would encourage to do, and I did it at half year last year, and we'll probably repeat it at half year this year, is split the two businesses into public sector and into corporate and look at the margin declining. Saying that, there has been a margin decline this year, obviously because we've had to deal with the incentive changes.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

I would expect that to stabilize and start growing because our real focus at the moment, services, higher margin, so, you know, focus on that. If you look at cyber, if you look at Azure, public cloud, you know, the rest of the managed service environment, higher margin. I think you'll start seeing on a like-for-like basis private sector, public sector growing, but acknowledge that it has been a decline in the year.

[Analyst]

Understood. Thank you. Just on the double digit growth, can you just confirm your double digit GP growth year-to-date?

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

Our guidance was high single-digit to low double-digit. Coming out of January and February, and why we highlight those two months is because that is where the Microsoft incentives has played through entire calendar year. That is the area that we normalize. Now, we would reiterate, call it very high single-digits and slightly lower single-digits for the second half. I'm not wanting to call anything more aggressive than that.

[Analyst]

All right. Move on. Just on for Sam, on sort of AI, you know, shift of consumption. I've got a couple of questions. First of all, Anthropic announced a couple of months ago a partner program. Have you had any engagement with them yet?

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

We are engaging with a number of new vendors, AI vendors. Yes, it's an exciting area for us. You know, even partners like Google, which have been a significant brand in the IT industry for decades, we haven't partnered as strongly with in the past. It's something that is changing 'cause of customer demand, and it's all about what do our customers want. If our customers feel that it's relevant to their strategy and we believe that we as a business can help provide value and advice around that, we will lean in. The answer is, yes, we're talking to a number of vendors in earnest at the moment.

[Analyst]

Thank you. You sort of mentioned there quite briefly, NHS Copilot rollout, but the numbers there, 500,000 people, I think, on the slide. That's a big implementation of Copilot.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

It's the biggest global Microsoft implementation.

[Analyst]

Yeah. Just tell us a little bit more about that, can you please? Particularly in terms of how you make money from it. Yeah.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

I can tell you a little bit. It's part of, you know, what Nick and I shared in the video around customers will make their commitment into a technology stack, and then of course it's how they enable it and with certain clients where strategic outcomes are being driven. Let's not forget the NHS is absolutely ripe for huge transformation way beyond just the Microsoft stack in so many areas, the data and security and so on. By focusing on the Capability and the SKUs they'd already invested in and moving this into the agent era of creating processes and automating. It's driving the efficiencies that the government have set out and NHS England have set out. Adoption change management skills is what we're talking about here.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

It's about going in and curating with the teams how they want to use that Copilot technology effectively. Obviously, there's been an awful lot of work from Microsoft consultancy to engineer and to drive that Copilot functionality to serve the healthcare industry in a way that they have established it needs to address certain needs. Our teams, and we're talking about a lot of people, and it's, you know, to your point, a lot of trusts and a lot of licenses we're going to be busy with for more than a year deploying. We've got metrics, and we've got particular targets that we will agree with Microsoft and deliver against over the next 12 months. It's a very important highly visible project to Microsoft, and we're, you know, we're very proud to be associated and to be the recipient, if you like, of that business to go and deliver it.

[Analyst]

Thanks.

[Damindu Jayaweera, Analyst at Peel Hunt]

Hi, Damindu Jayaweera from Peel Hunt. I got a couple of questions. I'll go one by one. First, one is for Andrew. Just kind of unbundling the GP guidance for FY 2027. If I were to think of the fact that the renewal rates went to 99% from what used to be kind of 190% and recovery of that towards perhaps not to the 109%, combined with your usual split between, you know, selling to existing customers versus new customers, is some sort of a normalization of those two numbers is the way to think about, you know, getting back to the kind of the high single digit, low double digit GP growth rate?

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

It's a very interesting observation. You're right. In the past, ignoring FY 2026 for a moment, we've had sort of 110, 112 last year, 109% renewal rates. On top of that, we've seen our growth 1/3 coming from new customers and two thirds coming from existing customers. In this year, we've had the 99% renewal rate at i.e., our existing customers have shrunk slightly, all of our growth came from new customers. I would expect that to normalize back because what we're seeing from our bigger vendors is striving for stability within their channel. I don't expect there's a lot of incentive changes coming down the pipe.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

That will mean that as we expand through AI, as we look at E5, E7, there'll be more into the existing customers, so we'll see our margin increase. I'd expect, let's say, going back to the sort of high single digit guidance, one third coming from new customers, two thirds coming from existing.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Sorry. Just to add to Andrew's point there. One of the key messages I brought back from Seattle a couple of weeks ago, you had all of the VPs of channel incentives global at Microsoft, and the key message of, obviously, the channel needed to know were there going to be any further changes, and the strategy and stability was the key thing. That was reassuring that all of the major changes we absorbed last year, there are no further ones in the short term to absorb.

[Damindu Jayaweera, Analyst at Peel Hunt]

Sam, congratulations on the eNPS scores going in the right direction. There are a few more changes to, I guess, to be executed, the Phoenix piece. Could you just remind us about the remaining small changes that you need to do? Why they will be less disruptive versus the changes that you had to do last year?

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Yeah. No, thanks, Damindu. In March this year, we announced as I've just talked about in the presentation, the fact that we had some overlap between Phoenix and Bytes on the public sector area and in fact, corporate. Both will now be pure play resellers. In doing so, there will be some teams, the Bytes public sector team coming over into reporting at Phoenix. They don't change offices. They don't disconnect from their customers. You know, on that basis, it's small change. The teams have already been integrated, sales kickoffs and some of the events we've been running recently, they traveled up to York. We're simulating, if you like, getting people familiar with the change of the team they'll be joining.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Equally, a small team on the Phoenix side, private business that will now report into Bytes. That will go live on the 1st of July. It's not a big switch point on that date because all of the work we've been going through, a lot of rigorous management of this and de-risking anything and novating contracts is obviously the next stage of where we're at in this process. That is all in hand. By 1st of July, the majority of the work will be carried out, although some of the novation will continue beyond that point, but we're in good shape for that.

[Damindu Jayaweera, Analyst at Peel Hunt]

The last one is thank you for the case studies, and thank you for, you know, the focus on Microsoft because Microsoft is clearly making really good progress in AI adoption. I mean, we at Peel Hunt know it. Our bills are going through the roof essentially related to Copilot stuff. Congratulations on your Frontier status. I just wanted to understand a little bit more, or maybe you can articulate a little bit more, because your MS-related services, I think you said, went up 31% last year. You kind of talked about the fact that there is, in the services space, which to me feels much more important going forward because of what AI is doing.

[Damindu Jayaweera, Analyst at Peel Hunt]

'Cause you had, like you rightly said, you have to be ready for AI, all the cybersecurity stuff and other things. You talked about vendor funding, managed services, and expanded services as kind of the three components in your kind of services piece. Is vendor funding the largest bit that's driving the growth that we will potentially see from services in FY 2027? Related to that, right now you have about 25% of staff in technical delivery. Does that staff count need to go up if you are to do more of the MS and expanded services?

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

For sure, Damindu. It does. One of the things that we didn't talk in depth about is a need for us to also absorb that technology into our own business, to actually drive, you know, the AI, the agentic era, the processes. It's happening. We have some of those technical teams actually dedicated to internal innovation and driving agents and making profound differences to some of the teams and how they work. It's an exciting era. To your point, no, the actual headcount around those areas will increase, and that's why M&A is also of interest, you know. If we can find the right teams to supplement or to get us there faster, then that makes sense, as long as culturally and the strategic alignment is there, too.

[Damindu Jayaweera, Analyst at Peel Hunt]

If I can squeeze in one last one. Could you just give us an example of actual internal use of AI? I know you rolled out some tools. Maybe just give one example where productivity has positively been impacted.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Well, I hope our competitors aren't listening. One of the most recent ones is clearly Microsoft licensing, takes an awful lot of time when you have a customer coming up for a renewal or if you're looking for a new bid. We have specialists that are looking into customer needs and what SKUs or previous investments they've got and how we can present the right contract, whether it's EA or CSP, to them. Where EAs are concerned, this is quite heavy duty pieces of work, hours, days, weeks, and then peer reviewing goes on as well as a final check.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

We have a new agent that's been created for the public sector team called License IQ, which automates that peer review and has removed hours of time from our license specialists. There's a team of call it 15 people who are crazy busy, you know, all peer reviewing, and suddenly now there's been a giant leap of the agent being able to crunch its way through it and then leaving the final human peer review with just a little bit of, you know, oversight. There's a significant time-saving advantage. What do you do with the time back? The licensing advisors can go and work with the customers on the next customer meeting and understanding their needs and getting deeper into strategy, as opposed to just going through lots and lots of shopping lists of SKUs. Yeah, there's an example.

[Company Representative at Bytes Technology Group]

Okay. Thank you. We've had a few questions online. First question is from Christopher Tong from UBS. Do you expect Microsoft 365 price increase to be a material tailwind for results?

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

It's too early to say, but some of the customer engagements I've been involved with, some of these were quite a few months ago before the price list, the files came out. It was really interesting how customers were appraising the new SKUs that are embedded into it and saw advantage. It gave me a thought process that actually if customers are in that right zone of thinking about the future and the AI SKUs and wanting those higher grade areas, then this will absolutely make sense. It's, by the way, it's Microsoft's first suite in many years. I don't know if it's 10 years since they launched one, it's, you know, it's quite interesting from that point of view.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

It's, you know, budgets are sensitive at the moment across both private and public sector, there's gotta be some damn good business justification behind it, and that comes back to license advisors, sellers really understanding what outcomes customers are trying to drive and where their strategy sits over the next few years. It's that, back to that deeper conversation of if we understand where a customer's going and what their vision is, how we then apply that M365 conversation back into it. Doesn't give you an answer, I guess. Do I think it's gonna drive material difference? I hope so.

[Company Representative at Bytes Technology Group]

Thank you. Next question is from Tim Allis from Laurium Capital. Customer NPS is lower for the second year in a row. What trends are behind this, and what is being done to improve customer NPS?

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Customer NPS is.

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

Customer NPS is actually higher than the prior year.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Yeah, no, we're very proud. sorry, Tim, I don't know if we've not been clear about it, but NPS is extraordinarily high. very proud of the number.

[Company Representative at Bytes Technology Group]

Okay. We'll move on to the next question. It's from Tim Allis again. Second question. Please can you talk through the decision not to pay a special dividend for this year?

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

Andrew?

[Andrew Holden, CFO at Bytes Technology Group]

I think, we've always undertaken to return excess cash to the shareholders, either via, special or via share buybacks. We did an extensive exercise, towards the middle of last year, particularly after the AGM and, our share price coming down to circa GBP 3. We acknowledged that it was better to return excess cash to our shareholders via a share buyback. Because our share price is still sitting, a lot lower than it was last year, we've repeated the exercise.

[Company Representative at Bytes Technology Group]

Thank you. No further questions at the moment. Sam, maybe I could hand back to you for any closing remarks.

[Sam Mudd, CEO at Bytes Technology Group]

No. I just want to thank you all for your time this morning. Looking forward to this year. I think we've got off to a positive start. If I think about the first few months trading, the momentum that we've talked about in H2 of last year continues, that obviously gives us confidence in our outlook. We've got a lot of work to do and, you know, we've detailed some of the areas that we're working hard in. Thank you, and we look forward to coming back in a few more months' time at the end of H1 and detailing more results for you. Thank you.

Participants

Executives

• Andrew Holden, CFO
• Sam Mudd, CEO
• Company Representative

Analysts

• Damindu Jayaweera, Analyst at Peel Hunt
• Nick Hedderman, UK and Ireland Channel Lead at Microsoft
• Tintin Stormont, Analyst at Deutsche Numis
• Analyst
• Analyst