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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Captain Jack who wrote (53521)	3/16/1999 7:00:00 AM
From: Red Scouser	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

victor; 03/16 06:34 INTERVIEW-Computacenter[CCC-news]sees life beyond Y2K By Philippa Moreton LONDON, March 16 (Reuters) - Britain's Computacenter Plc said on Tuesday its earnings growth would not be significantly affected by the millennium, despite an expected slight dip in margins at the end of the year. "The underlying business is good," Chief Executive Mike Norris told Reuters in an interview. "Whether there is a positive or negative blip or trough around the millennium is kind of irrelevant to the long term -- you've got to see through it," Norris said. "We are around the millennium (already) and it will probably become a smaller and smaller problem the closer we get -- right now we are pretty bouyant and there is the possibility we could be really, really bouyant -- it's a case of keeping your heads down and doing the best job you possibly can," he said. Earlier Computacenter, which floated on the London Stock Exchange last May, reported a 37.2 percent increase in pre-tax profits to 64.6 million pounds, for the year to December 31, 1998, on sales which rose 39.9 percent to 1,586 million pounds. The company issued a maiden dividend of 2.5 pence. Computacenter's shares were up 25p or five percent to 525p by 1100 GMT, slipping back from an ealier peak of 550p. Norris had admitted last month that the last quarter of the year and the first quarter of next year could see a slowdown in growth as customers postponed orders for new computers while waiting to see the full extent of date change related problems. But he said the company would see an improvement in its business to a greater services mix in the year ahead and expected business to continue as it had done in the last couple of years. "We don't need radical step change as we continue to organically improve the business with evolutionary change rather than revolutionary change in that service mix," he said. Set up in 1981, Computacenter has become one of the UK's best known computer distributors, supplying more than half of Britain's top 100 companies with leading brands. It is the largest British partner for giants COMPAQ Computer Corp [CPQ-news], IBM [IBM-news], Toshiba Corp [6502-news] and Hewlett-Packard [HWP-news] and in October last year announced it was strengthening its alliance with Microsoft Corp [MSFT-news] to promote Microsoft's services to Computacenter's clientbase. Following the success of Computacenter's expansion into France and Germany, where growth was well ahead of expectations in 1998, the company was currently looking for the right opportunities to expand further into Europe but had no plans to move into the US market. "Our general consensus is that we are going to be busy throughout the year," Norris said.