South Africa-based network reselling and services player Datatec has released a brief pre-close update this morning, following its February 29th year end. It signals revenues for FY12 of approx $5bn. That implies an increase of around 16% compared to FY11, although naturally there’s a fair slug of inorganic growth in there, as Datatec has acquired a dozen companies over the past two financial years.
There’s not enough detail in today’s statement to get a feel for how the year ended at Logicalis, Datatec’s network services arm. We’ll have to rely on what we heard in the previous statement in January for that (see Logicalis profitability up despite headwinds), and await the full group results in May. However, it’s no surprise that developing markets have remained the key driver of growth for Datatec: “Latin America, in particular Brazil, had another period of exceptional performance”. Meanwhile, the word from the UK is less positive: “the environment in the UK is still very weak”. A reminder perhaps that while 2012 appears to have got off to a slightly better start for some infrastructure players (based on our as yet anecdotal observations), there's no evidence that overall market growth has changed markedly compared to a year ago.