City Briefs: Clipper Logistics and WANdisco

Leeds-based logistics business Clipper Logistics says it has continued to trade well throughout the year.

Publishing its latest update on trading for the full year ended 30 April 2020, the company says it delivered an EBITA of about £24m for the year, an increase of nearly 19% on the prior year.

From the onset of lockdown on 23 March, there was a period of disruption within the Group’s operations for bricks-and-mortar retailers, as customers closed their stores.

Clipper says retail activity saw a “period of hiatus”, as consumer confidence was hit. But it says since that initial period of disruption there has been an accelerating level of trading activity.

Its update notes: “Clipper has experienced strong levels of activity from both new and existing clients.

“The company has provided support to online retailers with high e-fulfilment volumes, as some online retailers experienced extremely high levels of demand, regularly outstripping that seen over the Black Friday period last year.

“We are witnessing volume increases of over 100% on a like-for-like basis with some customers.

“April 2020 saw Clipper roll-out additional services for several grocery-related customers, including Tesco, Asda and Morrisons as they mobilised their operations to address the challenges of COVID-19.  

“Importantly, April also saw us begin our supply chain support to NHS frontline staff, including the warehousing and distribution of PPE to hospitals.”

Clipper says the extra activities brought on since lockdown, coupled with new contracts coming on stream in quarter one of FY21, will add a further 1.5 million square feet of space to its pre-existing 10 million sq ft infrastructure. 

The business says it expects to benefit from evolving trends in the retail sector, as COVID-19 accelerates the shift to online sales.

Steve Parkin, executive chairman of Clipper, added: “We’re now moving faster than ever, accelerating development and evolving to meet the expectations of both our retailers and their consumers, as the shift to online continues to accelerate.

“Nearly 70% of our revenue in both our UK and European logistics operations is derived from online retail. We are looking to the future with  confidence.”

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David Richards

Software business WANdisco has secured a global reseller agreement with a large global systems integrator (GSI).

The customer will have access to WANdisco’s full suite of solutions and use these to build its own data migration practice for moving data at scale into the public cloud.

WANdisco, which is based in Sheffield, says the sale and reach of this customer will provide significant new opportunities and these are expected to make a material contribution to revenue over the next 12 months.

CEO and chairman David Richards said: “Today’s announcement marks the company’s first agreement with a global systems integrator and our business momentum continues to be encouraging as we see additional growth opportunities working with them in the near-term.

“This agreement is the result of the customer proving that in situations where there is large scale, changing data, WANdisco is the only solution to automate data migration without risk of business downtime or data loss.

“There is a growing need for data consistency and data availability across the business world.

“WANdisco’s ability to facilitate petabyte scale cloud migration without business interruption is becoming a key factor for large organisations and their systems integrator partners as they accelerate their journey to the cloud.”