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Maintel signals strong pipeline going into second half
Channel player updates investors on its first half progress as the business looks for revenue improvements
The word “resilience” appears to be the one channel leaders reach for when discussing financial performance against a backdrop of an economy that continues to be constrained.
Earlier today, Bytes Technology Group’s CEO used the word in a trading update covering the channel player’s first half to the end of August, and it appears again in comments made by Maintel’s boss concerning its H1 numbers.
The cloud and managed communication services player shared interim results for the six months ended 30 June, with revenue in line with expectations, and were flat at £46.5m, with recurring revenue accounting for 74.3% of that total.
The firm pointed to a number of churned contracts as the reasons for the flat revenues, which offset a 20% growth in revenue from projects and the benefits derived from price increases.
Gross profit decreased to £14m from £14.7m, with gross margin also dropping to to 30.1% from 31.6%. Adjusted EBITDA decreased by 29.2% to £3.4m, with increased employer costs and investments in IT and marketing having an impact.
Maintel has worked on expanding its routes to market in H1, taking stands at events and advertising, and working with vendors to get the brand in front of more customers. The firm also established a customer acquisition sales team to support the ambition of bringing fresh customers into the fold.
The firm indicated its sales pipeline had reached a record high, climbing to £75m first year value by the end of the first half. “Maintel delivered a resilient performance in the first half of 2025, with continued progress across our transformation programme and strategic focus areas,” said Dan Davies, Maintel CEO. “We saw encouraging momentum in our core technology pillars and entered the second half with the largest sales pipeline we’ve seen in recent years.”
Transforming into a specialist
The business has been on a journey to transform into a specialist, rather than a comms services generalist, focusing on unified communications and collaboration, customer experience, and security and connectivity.
“The ongoing transformation of our organisational structure, cost base, ways of working and operational efficiency are all progressing as planned, ensuring that we are ready to deliver efficiently when the execution of our growth strategy comes to fruition,” said Davies.
“We are committed to building long-term differentiation in the market, optimising our operating model, and delivering sustainable growth, profitability and cash generation,” he added.
The Maintel numbers follow on from a trading update from Bytes, which indicated that the business was on track to meet expectations but the market remained a challenging one.
“We delivered a resilient performance, improving through the period as we successfully settled into our new corporate sales structure,” said Sam Mudd, CEO of Bytes.
She also used a similar tone to the one used by Davies to talk of the prospects for the second half, which were looking stronger.
“We have a strong pipeline and we expect continued momentum into the start of the second half, albeit mindful that comparatives will be impacted by the particularly strong trading performance we saw in the past few months of the prior financial year,” she said. “We remain confident in our growth strategy and believe we are well-positioned to benefit from the structural demand drivers we see in our markets, including cloud computing, cyber security and AI [artificial intelligence].”
