Concorde looks for buy-outs as profits take off

The Leeds-based group has been awarded a £1m contract with Yorkshire Water to provide its engineers with Panasonic Toughbooks – laptops made to withstand harsh use in the field.

It has also signed up Tata Steel, DFS Furniture, DHL, the NHS and Everton Football Club as new clients.

Concorde’s chief executive Colin Meakin said that now the group is back in profit, it is on the look out for more acquisitions.

“We are at an advanced stage on another six-figure acquisition,” he said.

“We have good financial backing and a strengthening balance sheet. We will look at further acquisitions of up to seven-figure sums and we’re looking across the country.”

When Mr Meakin joined the company in 2008, it made a loss of £120,000. It was at break even in 2009 and the latest results for the year to December 31 show it made a profit of £118,000.

New clients include Doncaster-based DFS Furniture, which has taken on Concorde’s IT booths.

“When you go into a DFS store you can go to a touch screen and choose a sofa, a colour, what price you want, you can check its availability and see what it would like in your living room.”

The company has also signed up Tata Steel and now looks after all the steel company’s process control equipment in Rotherham.

“Tata melts iron ore and turns it into steel in these big melting pots,” said Mr Meakin.

“We maintain all the hardware. You have to measure the temperature and work out which chemicals to add and remove. We have engineers permanently based at all Tata’s sites.”

Concorde is supplying around 500 Toughbooks to Yorkshire water as part of a deal worth over £1m.

“Toughbooks are used by the guys that dig up the roads. They are like laptops, but you can drop them, they’re indestructible,” said Mr Meakin.

Concorde will pre-configure and maintain all of Yorkshire Water’s Toughbooks, providing bespoke GPS software applications.

The Toughbooks provide the engineers with their work schedules, including customer details and problem histories.

Concorde’s Geographic information system (GIS) software helps them to locate water above and below ground and in some cases, engineers can use their Toughbook to remotely control specific treatment works.

Engineers can also update Yorkshire Water’s database in real time.

In the event of a burst pipe, engineers can use the Toughbook touch screen to draw a detailed map of a repair’s impact and feed that data back to Yorkshire Water’s headquarters.

“The Toughbook helps us serve our customers better,” said Yorkshire Water’s IT director Alan Harrison.

“By getting data out into the field, our guys can make decisions quickly and feed critical data back into the system. Everyone sees what’s going on.”

“Concorde IT’s response to our service issues has enabled us to ensure that when a hardware or software failure occurs a field technician will have a replacement Toughbook delivered to him and configured for his use anywhere in the Yorkshire Region within four hours of reporting a fault,” he added.

Concorde’s sales fell by £1m to £5.9m in 2010, reflecting the sale of the CARM police roster software division for a seven-figure sum.

“CARM served police forces such as the Metropolitan Police with software that allowed 30,000 policemen to clock on, clock off and book a holiday,” said Mr Meakin.

“We never intended to keep CARM, but the sale has given us the cash to buy other companies.”

CARM was bought by Northgate Information Solutions last July.

The sale of CARM gave Concorde the financial fire power to buy Control Key, a Blackburn-based IT security and managed services provider. “This was an important strategic acquisition as it allowed us to establish an immediate foothold in the North West,” said Mr Meakin.

It was also able to buy RW Communications based in Stockley Park, close to Heathrow Airport.

“RW Communications, bought for a seven figure, made us a nationwide IT services company.”

The two acquisitions have been rebranded under the Concorde IT Group banner with new logos and livery.

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