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Computacenter (LSE: CCC) led the FTSE 250 Thursday morning (January 22) with the first 10% spike. It is one of the best growing stocks of the cap index for the last 12 months, with a gain of 61%.
The driver in this case is a glowing trading update ahead of full-year results, announcing a 32% increase in revenue at constant currency. The gains were mainly driven by the company’s Technology Sourcing division, which saw a 38% increase in invoiced revenue.
The benefit of AI
There was one thing that stood out to me right away. The review said: “We are very pleased with our execution in North America, experiencing strong consistent growth throughout the year with enterprise and hyperscale customers“.
Hyperscale Clients – I like that quite a bit. No one could miss the surge of AI technology. And along with all those souped-up processing chips and big language models, business needs infrastructure.
Computacenter is about providing the IT hardware – computers, networks, and everything else – that the technology industry runs on. And lots of software to manage it all. It provides strategic, advisory and management services as well.
Old-time investors like to go back to the golden days of California. At that time, some became bigger and some exploded. But the traders who sell picks and shovels pocket a bundle. Companies like Computacenter are the pick and shovels of the AI revolution.
What’s next?
Full-year results aren’t due by March 26, but it sounds like it’s worth the wait. With this latest announcement, management said “We now expect adjusted pre-tax profit for 2025 to be no less than £270m, comfortably ahead of market expectations.Analysts were forecasting between £243m and £259m.
Net cash at the end of December stood at £600m, excluding IFRS 16 lease liabilities.
Looking ahead to 2026, the board also told us: “We exited 2025 in a strong position with a committed product order backlog across all locations at the end of December that was significantly higher than we were in both December 2024 and the end of June 2025.“.
Cheap in price?
The biggest opportunity brings what I see as the biggest risk. Never mind the bursting of the AI bubble, if there is even a slowdown in the next year it could see investors turn their backs on tech stocks. We should also be well aware that trade with the US is not going well these days.
And Computacenter being a small FTSE 250 company can make big investors less confident. But I think the stock price has enough safety to cover the risk. We are looking at a forecast price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 20 based on the recent share price and my estimated earnings consensus review. I think that is correct.
Investors looking for a piece of the AI pie of the future, but with less risk than going to the leading edge Nasdaq techies, would do well to consider Computacenter.
