Iomart, Glasgow Cloud Firm, tops £100m for first time

Glasgow-based cloud computing firm Iomart Group plc said on Tuesday its annual revenue exceeded £100 million for the first time in the year to March 31.

Iomart said revenue grew 6% to £103.7 million and adjusted profit before tax grew 6% to £25.5 million.

Proposed final dividend is 5.01p per share, resulting in total dividend for the year of 7.46p per share, an increase of 4% — representing the tenth consecutive year of dividend growth.

Iomart CEO Angus MacSween said: “These results represent another year of strong performance by the company, with increased revenues, profits, cash flow and dividend levels.

“The demand for the products and services we provide continues to grow.

“Over the last 12 months we have reinvigorated our sales and marketing function which delivered a strong finish to the year with March, the final month of our financial year, recording the highest month of revenue in the year.

“We enter the new year with confidence, underpinned by a significantly larger pipeline of prospects than this time last year. 

“The journey to Cloud adoption remains a long term trend and, as a result, our market opportunity is large and widening.

“We continue to invest in our cloud product offering, skills and organisational platform to ensure we are positioned to capitalise on this opportunity, and the board is confident that strong growth will continue for many years into the future.” 

Iomart completed two acquisitions during the year — York-based Bytemark Holdings Limited and LDeX Group Limited which provides datacentre and connectivity services in the UK from central London and Manchester locations.

Iomart said it expects M&A activity to continue “as an important growth driver for the group” in what remains a highly fragmented market.

In the firm’s results, MacSween added: “Overall our market continues to grow strongly.

“A large part of this growth is dominated by the ‘hyper-scalers’, primarily Amazon, Microsoft and Google. 

“These organisations are now established parts of the landscape and what has been shown, especially given the trend to multiple cloud architectures, is that there is plenty of space for organisations like iomart and the hyper-scalers to coexist. 

“We strongly believe our differentiation is that we provide advice, help, great customer service and flexibility.

“In addition, what is being shown is that for organisations with a stable baseload of computer power, iomart’s bespoke cloud solutions can compete head to head on full life costs. 

“The untidy nature of the vast majority of the world’s legacy IT infrastructure provides us with the reassurance that there will always be customers who are looking for a trusted advisor in this space.”