IT MAINTENANCE company Smart Capital Technology (SCT) is bucking the post-Brexit trend and expanding its business across Europe after winning a series of major contracts.
While many UK firms are downsizing European operations because of export issues, the Reading company has seen the European side of its business grow from ten to 30 per cent in less than two years and now looks after more than 150,000 devices across the English Channel.
It provides parts and engineers to replace and repair business-critical networks on behalf of IT suppliers who support an extensive range of organisations – from household brands to industrial businesses – in need of connectivity to networks or servers.
Its 80 staff and over 25,000 parts stored at more than 40 locations across the UK, Europe and the US enables it to guarantee delivery of replacement parts, and in some cases an engineer, for 500,000 devices in as little as two hours.
CEO Andy Morgan who took over the reins of the firm after a management buyout in 2022, said because the company had set up eight storage and distribution hubs in Germany with more than 5,000 spare parts ready to be shipped across the continent, it has been untroubled by red tape at the border.
“We opened a major hub in Frankfurt last year and established a separate legal identity and that has made the transition much smoother,” he said. “Having hubs across Europe has been instrumental in being able to move quickly. And we have a policy of buying locally so that we don’t need to export anything.
“We are absolutely delighted that the growth has been so rapid. It has come through our existing partners and their customers where they have sites in Europe. It was really about proving that we could deliver on our service level agreements in the UK and smaller areas within Europe and building upon that.”
The company has invested in more than 100 hours of staff training. “We felt it was vital that we give language training to call centre staff,” said Mr Morgan.
“We don’t need people to be perfect linguists but our team have been able to adapt to having a German or French call and be comfortable speaking to them and understanding their needs. It is important for us to do that because in Europe English companies can be thought of as quite insular.”
SCT has also recruited two fluent German speakers.
Mr Morgan said that having a larger European presence at a time when many UK firms are retrenching is important for its reputation. “Most bigger businesses, especially in the IT sector, operate in more than one country and while we’ve always done it to some degree now that we have an even bigger presence in Europe, we have become more attractive and has earned us greater respect,” he said.
“While we haven’t set a specific target, we want to keep on growing in Europe and capitalising on our strengths. We have an excellent, scalable, digital platform that gives us control over our processes and insight into what’s going on where.”
