Bytes Technology Group Plc

How does this company make money?

Bytes earns a margin on each software licence it resells, buying from Microsoft and vendors at partner pricing and selling at a higher rate to customers. For customers who need help setting up or migrating systems, it charges professional services fees for that implementation work. It also receives rebates from vendors, including Microsoft, when quarterly sales hit agreed volume targets.

What makes this company hard to replace?

A public sector body buying through G-Cloud cannot simply move to a supplier that lacks a G-Cloud listing — the procurement rules do not allow it. Corporate customers who have signed Microsoft Enterprise Agreements are locked into multi-year licensing commitments. Organisations that have built their internal systems on Azure Active Directory face a significant technical project — migration planning, data transfer, and staff recertification — before they could move to a different platform or supplier.

What limits this company?

Moving up to a better pricing tier requires not just higher sales but also more engineers who hold specific Microsoft certifications. Those engineers have to be hired one by one, trained, and kept. You cannot buy your way past that headcount requirement. So even if new customers are ready to sign, the company can only grow into the next tier as fast as it can hire and keep certified staff.

What does this company depend on?

Bytes cannot operate without four things: Microsoft's partner certification and its volume licensing agreements, which set the pricing that makes the business work; the G-Cloud framework, which is the only legal route to UK public sector contracts; technical staff who hold Microsoft Azure and security certifications; and sterling-denominated credit facilities that fund the purchase of software inventory before customers pay.

Who depends on this company?

UK corporate IT departments use Bytes as their main route to Microsoft licences and rely on it for technical support when moving workloads to Azure. UK public sector organisations depend on it for access to Microsoft and security software through the G-Cloud framework — without Bytes they would need to find another approved supplier and restart procurement. Microsoft itself would lose one of its significant UK distribution channels for Azure and Office 365.

How does this company scale?

Adding another customer to a software licence resale costs very little once the systems are in place — the same licence agreement covers more buyers without proportional extra cost. But any customer who needs hands-on help migrating to Azure or setting up security tools requires a certified engineer's time, and that cannot be automated. So the licence-resale side grows cheaply, while the consulting and implementation side is always limited by how many qualified people the company can field.

What external forces can significantly affect this company?

UK government spending cuts shrink the public sector IT budgets that feed a large share of Bytes's sales. Post-Brexit rules on data sovereignty push UK organisations to keep data stored domestically, which shapes what products they can buy and how. Because most of the underlying software comes from American vendors like Microsoft and is priced in US dollars, a weaker pound directly raises what Bytes pays for inventory before it can resell it.

Where is this company structurally vulnerable?

If Microsoft raised the sales volume or certified-headcount requirements for its top pricing tier, the combined output of both subsidiaries might no longer be enough to stay at that level. Dropping to a lower tier means worse pricing, which shrinks the margins that pay for the certified engineers, which makes it harder to meet headcount requirements, which pushes the tier down further — each step making the next one harder to recover from.