I must advise you that this conference is being recorded today, Wednesday the 24th of March 2021. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Graeme Watt. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you very much, and good morning, everybody. Graham Charlton, who's with me this morning, and I would like to welcome you to this morning's Softcat briefing on the first half H1 fiscal 2021 results. We thank you for your interest in Softcat. In the first half of FY21, we have again delivered strong, profitable organic growth and taken market share while continuing to invest in the business. We've made further progress in delivering against our strategy. We are one year into the global pandemic now. Our most recent words of the year, care and together, are just so appropriate. They resonate as strongly as ever. We've all faced personal and business challenges as a result of the pandemic. Throughout the period, the team at Softcat have demonstrated that together we care.
The unconditional support we've shown each other, our partners, and our customers has been amazing. I'd like to take this opportunity to say thank you. Thank you to each and every one of you at Softcat. It really does continue to be a great privilege to be part of this team, and I'm looking forward to working in person again with you all and all of our partners and our customers just as soon as we safely can. Moving to slide two, if we may, please. As with previous briefings, I'd just like to take a moment to describe our business for those of you less familiar than others. On this slide, you can see our full-year fiscal 2020 key numbers, just to give you a sense of the scale of the business. Together, you'll also see our half-year reported numbers on headcount and on customer base.
Softcat is a leading reseller of infrastructure solutions and technology products and services in the U.K. and Ireland to both the business and the public sector communities. We serve a customer base of 9,600 customers at the half year end and focusing on the segments of enterprise, mid-market, and public sector. We work very closely with a strong portfolio of over 200 vendors, providing our customers with choice and solutions that are fit for their specific needs. Where we don't hold resources or capabilities internally, we're happy to partner with third parties to complete the solution for the customer. We operate out of nine offices in the U.K. and Ireland and have branches in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Ireland, the U.S., and most recently opened one in the Netherlands. These branches support what we call our multinational business.
Think of it as a mechanism to sell and facilitate the overseas needs of existing and new customers in the U.K. and Ireland. We continue to operate, over all the business, we continue to operate a simple model with a clear strategy that is effectively executed. From a cultural perspective, we foster a culture that thrives on putting our people and our customers first and believe that by working hard to deliver the highest levels of employee engagement and commitment, that this in turn helps us to deliver exceptional customer service. This essence is well captured in our purpose statement: We help customers use technology to succeed by putting our employees first.
We believe our culture is a key positive differentiator for us in what is a fragmented market. We're pleased to receive further recognition in the period for the strength and positive impact that culture has on both our employees and our business. Our growth continues to be wholly organic and has been sustained throughout our 28-year history. This is something we're very proud of. Our cash conversion is strong. We're debt free. We're strongly cost conscious. We balance that with an eye on the future and the need to be almost continually investing to deliver current growth at the same time as looking to secure longer-term growth. If we could turn to slide three, please. The first half summary results. You can see our first half fiscal 2021 summary results on this slide.
I'm not going to run through each of the numbers except to reiterate that despite the COVID-19 pandemic, we have delivered strong double-digit organic growth. We've continued with our robust investment program in internal systems and tools and heads too. We're always looking to build skills and capacity for the longer term, as I mentioned, and in the last 12 months, we've backed that up by growing heads by 12% or 177 people. We've made share gains in the period and benefited from strong and focused execution. We also made further positive progress across all of our key performance metrics, including productivity as measured by gross profit per head. We added new customers, and we made nice advances in customer satisfaction and employee engagement, too. We've now reported 31 consecutive six-month periods of organic year-over-year income and profit growth. The balance sheet is strong with no debt.
Cash conversion remains high. We're pleased to announce an interim dividend of GBP 0.064 per share, up 18.5% on the prior period. If we can turn to slide four now, please, to give a little bit of a business update. As I've already mentioned before, we've benefited enormously from the way the Softcat team have reacted to the challenges of the pandemic. The breadth and depth of our technology solutions and the diversity of our customer base have also served us well. Those three factors have really been key contributors to our performance in the first half of the year. Our public sector business remains strong, and it's been pleasing to see some recovery in corporate demand, too. In particular, we've seen that recovery in our data center category and our mid-market segment as businesses begin to look more to the future.
We delivered double-digit growth in gross invoiced income in hardware, which was up 31%, in software, which was up 13%, and in services, which was up 23%. We grew gross invoiced income in our mid-market and public sector segments by 32% and 23% respectively. Whilst gross invoiced income from enterprise customers declined by 9%. Our mid-market performance, in part, benefited from some of our largest ever deals, whilst enterprise demand has remained mixed, with the more challenged verticals such as non-essential retail, travel, entertainment, and events unsurprisingly taking longer to get back to pre-pandemic spend levels. We grew our headcount significantly in the period, as we said we would, and this investment of 177 additional heads was widespread by functions as we look to support and grow our capabilities and capacity right the way across the board.
We have got a strong sense that relationships have deepened and strengthened through the pandemic, and I believe we've managed our employees, our customers, our vendors, our distributors, and service partners very well. As I mentioned earlier, that's borne out by our key customer employee metrics, both showing positive gains in the last 12 months. Moving more to the technology now. The technology trends that we've seen in the last couple of years remain consistent, but in certain respects have gathered pace during the pandemic. Technologies continue to be a focus for investment for many organizations as they look to accelerate the security of their operations, they look to manage increasingly distributed workforces, and they look to migrate some of their workloads to the cloud, most commonly in a hybrid infrastructure, together with some on-premise technology too.
Lockdown and remote working has driven accelerated digital transformation. There's clearly a growing demand for data insights, for remote learning, and for distance diagnostics, as well as on-demand and access to capacity. Our customers are looking for us to help them migrate to a mobile working structure, help them enhance their employee and customer experiences, as well as delivering productivity and efficiency gains where possible. The future is increasingly distributed and digital. Many of the tools, platforms, and technologies that our customers require sit comfortably in our portfolio. Looking forward, the market feels robust. We can see several growth areas to supplement the trends we've just discussed. Remote working, education, conferencing, and collaboration are all here to stay. Importantly, these capabilities are yet to be fully built out across most organizations.
There are a complex set of needs that need supporting, so it's not just about the device, it's about the connectivity, the security of that connection, the access and storage of data, the telephony and accessories and applications to support. On top of all of that, we continue to believe we're on the cusp of a widespread 5G rollout that will enable the delivery of real-time intelligent outcomes at the edge and drive a proliferation of sensors into our environment to provide insights, productivity, efficiencies, and better outcomes for our businesses and our planet. I really think there's a lot to look forward to. Turning to slide five now, if I may, and a little bit more about the business during the pandemic. Naturally, we spent a lot of time focusing on the well-being and the support and safety of our teams while taking strength from our culture.
There's no doubt, I mentioned the culture earlier on, but there's no doubt that our culture, which gives us a cutting edge in the good times, has also been a great source of strength throughout the pandemic, where we've been able to lean on this culture to provide extraordinary levels of comfort and support, both inside and outside the company. We've actively communicated with our staff to keep them appraised of everything we're doing and why, and we've put a ton of effort into remaining very much connected to each other through office Q&A sessions, coffee mornings, team meetings, pulse surveys, and many other mechanisms too. Remote working has clearly provided its benefits and its challenges throughout the pandemic to both employees and the business, and we look forward to getting our people back into the office as soon as it makes sense.
Once back, we'll see what adjustments we need to make in how and where we work together in what will be a hybrid working construct in the future. As we reported in our last full year results, it was great to see those employee and customer engagement satisfaction ratings rise, not just a little bit, but significantly in the middle of a pandemic. In a particular highlight in January, we were able to announce the reinstatement of our annual pay review process backdated to the start of the year. A decision that we were delighted to be able to make as a direct consequence of the performance we've achieved and reported for the first half. Our model has built-in resilience driven by our culture and our breadth of offering and customer base.
We were able to recruit almost normally during a period where attrition rates understandably fell. I'm pleased to be able to say that at no point were redundancies, furloughing, or government support required. Our cash flows and bad debt experience have continued to behave normally. Remain under increased internal scrutiny, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. If we can move to slide six now, please. I just want to cover a few points around our strategy and execution. We take comfort, hopefully many of you do too, that our strategy remains very consistent with previous years. It's straightforward and frankly relies on very focused execution. Technology and consumption models are continually shifting. We're constantly evolving our approach to the market, very much within this strategic framework. There's a lot of complexity in IT infrastructure.
There's a lot of choice. The pace of change is relentless. We provide expertise and skills and the benefit of insights from almost 10,000 customers. We bring those insights to bear every time we speak to a customer. On top of that, we've got the support and partnership of over 200 leading vendors to help us build out the solution for each individual customer. Our goals are to grow our customer base by introducing new customers to our capabilities and to grow our share of wallet with existing customers. We operate in a fragmented market. We believe as market leader, we still only have around 3.5% of the available market by sales, and probably around 20% by customer number. That means, on average, we have between 15% and 20% share of wallet with our customers.
Our aim is to keep driving that figure up by building trust and loyalty over time, to become one of two leading partners for each of our customers as a minimum. We can see our opportunity for longer-term growth in building that share of wallet, in further growth in the market by adding new customers, and taking measures over time to expand our addressable market. All of our customers have IT infrastructure needs from the workspace to the data center, and every day we expose our existing customers and new customers to the compelling propositions we have to offer. As we've said before, the pandemic has shone a spotlight on just how fundamental technology is to business and public sector entities. Investing in technology is no longer discretionary. It's become part of the fabric for companies to operate.
The world is becoming ever more connected, and the demand for digital infrastructure will only grow. It is clear that our industry has a very bright future, and we continue to be very excited by the opportunities the market offers. If I can just move and cover some of the supporting pillars to the strategy too. On people and culture, we were really delighted to be ranked fifth overall by Great Place To Work for the second year in a row. As we said before, our desire and ability to recruit has been undiminished through the pandemic, and we've added resources across all areas of the business. I'll talk a little bit later in a bit more depth about some of our diversity and inclusion initiatives.
I want to just say now that we were pleased to welcome Louise Fellows in January, joining us as Public Sector Director from VMware. Louise has settled in really well and spearheads the next phase of our growth in Public Sector, particularly further penetration in Defense and Secure Government as well as Central Government. This in turn has allowed Ant Cowen to step up and take the Sales Director role, now overseeing both the Public Sector and Corporate segments. I'm a strong believer that hiring and promoting women into senior positions across the company is one of a number of important moves that will enable us to reach our gender diversity ambitions over time. From an operational excellence perspective, during the period we managed the Brexit transition, and we expanded our multinational network.
Whilst the Brexit transition in many respects is still a work in progress, we put a lot of work in to make sure our export sales are backed up with some excellent people and some really good processes. We feel that we've taken a lead on the management of Brexit in the channel, and we've been very well supported by our distribution of vendor partners, and we've made sure that our customers and our salespeople internally have been hand-held throughout the process. Our entity in the Netherlands has been key in maintaining a smooth export model for our customers' needs in the EU. Our systems and data upgrade project is going well and remains positioned for implementation in our next fiscal year. We're pleased with our progress on many fronts with sustainability, too, and Graham Charlton will cover this later.
Just to say now that we feel passionately about this topic, and it's imperative that we all demonstrate leadership in this area and take action now to make our planet a safer and cleaner place. There's no time to waste. From an addressable market perspective, we will continue to expand our entity network to support our U.K. and Irish customers with their overseas needs. I know I sound like a broken record on this topic, but just for the sake of clarity, where we have branch entities outside the U.K. and Ireland, we're not selling to net new customers in those locations. What we are doing is adding more value and making the supply chain much slicker for our customers.
These entities facilitate local billing in local currency with local sales taxes and are supported by local relationships with vendors and distributors, so we can procure and deliver locally and at the same time be commercially competitive too. Most of the processes and administration is run from the U.K., but we do have personnel on the ground in Singapore and in the U.S. to manage the business in Asia-Pac and North America, respectively, on their own time zones. Our investments in this structure are customer-led, and we're in the process of adding further personnel in the U.S. to support our customers' growing needs in that market.
Client devices have also been in the spotlight since the pandemic broke, and we've now set ourselves up to be more active and more ambitious in this space, having built the right processes, the right commercials, and more sophisticated supply chain management to support our customers. That work's very much work in progress as we speak. As the move to cloud adoption gathers pace, and it has, it should be no surprise to anybody that we're investing further in this space, both generally and specifically ramping up our engagements with both Microsoft and AWS. With that, I'd now like to hand over to Graham Charlton to add some more color on the numbers and talk about our sustainability efforts. Graham.
Thank you, Graeme. We'll have a look at the financials in a little more detail now. If we could turn on to slide number eight, please. We'll begin with the summary income statement. As I think almost everybody on this call will know by now, we regard gross profit as our primary measure of income. That's the gross value we invoice to customers less direct product and other costs. As such, it's the point at which our salespeople start earning commission, and it's also where the company's earnings really begin as well.
As you can see on the slide, gross profit grew by just over 20% in the period, and that's a very pleasing result for the company and compares well even against the very strong growth that we've posted over the last two to three years. This is especially the case, of course, when we consider the context of the results. We entered the current financial year with the first COVID-19 lockdown not far in the rearview mirror, and at that time, we were very clear that we were seeing a noticeable dip in spending from our corporate customers, both small and large, as a direct result of the impact of COVID-19 restrictions and the uncertainty that that was having on their businesses.
What we've seen since then is a gradual recovery in levels of spend from corporate customers, particularly in the mid-market, where gross invoice income and gross profit growth were both more than 30% in our first half of this year. We think this reflects a number of factors, the reopening of parts of the economy through the summer and autumn of last year, but also the recovery in confidence that ultimately a pathway through this crisis would emerge, and in line with our own outlook on our own business, that companies that continue to invest during the difficult times would ultimately emerge stronger. In our first half, we saw a number of customers catching up on projects that had been placed on hold during the early stages of COVID-19, as well as a few of the largest individual projects the company has ever executed.
While it's difficult to isolate and quantify such activity perfectly, we think approximately 6%-8% of the gross profit growth we achieved in the period related to catch-up or one-off projects. That will, of course, make for very tough H1 comparatives next financial year, but that's the kind of challenge that we like as well. Mid-market was the star performer, but we also continued to see strong growth from our public sector accounts too, and growth there in excess of 20%. With that slight shift in mix towards the mid-market, our gross profit margin, when compared to gross income, increased ever so slightly to 15.4%. Moving down to the cost line next, you can see that overheads were up by nearly 9% in the period. The vast majority of our cost base, around 85% of it, relates to our employees in one way or another.
Once again, that growth in cost stems mostly from our recruitment activity. Headcount is up 12% on the prior period, and we've continued, as we said we would, to bring in new cohorts of salespeople, but as well, we've continued to invest in technical services and business operations headcount too. Normally, with that level of headcount growth, at 12%, and coupled with a 20% increase in gross profit, which of course drives higher commission costs, normally that would drive out something in the region of 15%-18% cost growth. This year, we're benefiting from cost savings enforced upon us, as it were, by the COVID-19 restrictions.
These principally relate to the fact we can't go and see customers face to face, we don't have people traveling between our offices, and also that we can't run our usual program of incentive events and parties and so on for our own employees. Consequently, cost growth is just 9% and not more like 16%. That means, in turn, the operating profit growth topped 40%. Now, that's a great financial result, of course, and we're very much looking forward, though, to getting back and seeing customers in person and starting back up with our internal events, which are such an important part of our unique culture as well. We hope and expect that this will begin to happen in the second half, but it's reasonable also to consider that most of that cost rebound will occur during the next financial year from August.
Of course, that will bring with it significant cost growth in financial year 2022. There's not too much going on below operating profit as usual, reflecting our debt-free position and very simple tax set up. The very small net interest expense reflects the IFRS 16 lease charge, which is offsetting a modest interest income from our cash holdings. The tax rate is stable year- on- year with an effective charge of 19.2%, just above the statutory headline rate. We'll turn on to slide nine, please, and a very familiar update on slide nine of our sales team's productivity. We frequently talk about the importance of the relationship between tenure and productivity in our business, both in relation to our account managers, but also to our customers. The two things do of course go hand in hand.
Our business is built upon our culture. That culture is about building strong relationships grounded in trust over the very long term. As our account managers mature and their relationships with their customers develop, so too does the trust that those customers place in us. At an organizational level, you can see the financial result of that here. This chart correlates our gross profit on a 12-month rolling basis with the cumulative total experience of our sales teams. Once again, with the latest data point added to the chart, the closeness of the correlation is striking. The step on the X-axis is noticeably a little bigger this time too. That reflects the lower attrition that we have seen in sales since the start of the pandemic.
The bulk of that effect played out during last calendar year, and we've seen levels of attrition begin to normalize again so far in this calendar year. A common question we've been asked is how the remote working environment has impacted on our newer salespeople. Have they been able to make a start, or does this disrupt our model in any way? The answer to that is, while it has been a little harder for us to win new customers in this period, our new starts have been successfully onboarded, and they are making progress. In fact, when we look at the productivity of our salespeople by cohort, those new starts are doing just as well as the more experienced groups proportionate to historic norms.
We're confident that COVID won't create a lost intake, as it were, and I think that that's testament to our culture and particularly the dedication of our sales team leaders. Turning on to slide 10, and slide 10 shows the trend in the size of our customer base against gross profit per customer expansion. You can see the other side of the account manager productivity coin here. The bar graph illustrates the steady expansion of the customer base, and note that has continued during the COVID affected periods so far. These sets are at six-month intervals, but on a 12-month rolling basis. In the most recent period, the customer base grew by 1.5%, standing now at 9,600. The line graph shows our average GP per customer.
You'll notice here that the acceleration in that KPI, which began in our FY 2018, stalled a little during the second half of FY 2020. That's the COVID-driven caution that we talked about. We're very much back on form and recovering that lost ground caused by that pause during the latest period. These two KPIs continue to be the best manifestation of our cunning strategy to win more customers and sell more to existing customers. We think this progress vindicates our decision to maintain high levels of investment during times of acute market volatility like we've just experienced. The long-term prospects, we think, are very assured. Our latest calculations estimate that we serve one in five addressable customers, and one in five of those customers are in our current customer base.
On average, we think we have a 15%-20% share of wallet. Therefore, that gives us something like a 3.5% share of our overall addressable market value. There's no reason we believe why that can't continue to expand very significantly from here. Our market is highly fragmented. That fragmentation doesn't really serve customers' best interests. There'll always be more than enough competition in our industry. Increasingly, as IT infrastructure becomes more complex, there is more and more need for actors such as ourselves and just probably a very few others at the present time who have the capability to consult on large, multifaceted solutions. Turning to slide 11, we'll have a quick look at the cash flow information.
Since the start of the pandemic, we have been watching the KPIs around our customer receivables very closely, as you might imagine, and we're pleased to report that it remained very much within normal parameters throughout. As a result of that, we once again report a very healthy conversion of operating profits to cash, even after the deduction of capital expenditure. Conversion of 88% is a little bit below our average of the last five years, which reflects a slight increase in capital expenditure, which mainly relates to the design and build of our new finance system and the completion of the refurbishment of our largest offices, Marlow and Manchester, at the start of this financial year. The finance system project will continue during half two, and for the full year, we're looking for conversion of the order of 85%.
Below operating cash flows, the tax outflow is reduced year- on- year as we re-normalize following adjustments to the new corporation tax regimen, the dividend outflow is also reduced versus the comparative. The reduction in the dividend outflow reflects the uplift of our cash flow from GBP 30 million-GBP 45 million when we calculated the special dividend relating to last financial year. That's slightly offset by the interim dividend we delayed at the onset of COVID-19 coming back in and being paid in December 2020 alongside the final and special dividends. Just turning on to page 12 then, we'll confirm the details of the interim dividend that we are announcing today, we're back onto a normal cadence for dividend payments now. The interim dividend that we're announcing today, as Graeme already said, is GBP 0.064 per share, that payment will be made in May.
That's 19% up on the notional comparative. The shares will go ex-dividend on the 31st of March. Finally from me on slide 13, as Graeme alluded to briefly earlier, we just want to give you a quick update on the plans that we have to ensure that Softcat and our industry have not only a profitable future but also a sustainable one as well. We've been doing lots of work and thinking in this area and wanted to just share a taste of our latest plans and commitments. We have now signed the UN Global Compact and set ourselves three targets. Aligned with that, we'll fund an offset to our carbon footprint during the course of the remainder of this year and convert entirely to renewable sources for use in our operations by 2024.
Over the longer term, we aim to ensure a net zero supply chain by 2040. We are working with the Science Based Targets initiative to develop and publish an action plan so that we can play our part in safeguarding the one and a half degree rise limit within the Paris Climate Change Agreement. I think in the last few days, we've been the first FTSE 250 company to be given the five-star rating by the Support the Goals organization that aligns with these targets and efforts as well. This is also an area where we can help our customers and suppliers with. Our industry has a very big role to play in protecting the planet's future, accounting today, probably for around about 20% of commercial emissions.
We're collaborating with our vendors to ensure that their innovations are brought to market, and we're developing lifecycle services that we offer to customers, hopefully playing our role in the development towards a genuinely circular economy. We'll talk a little bit more about all of this alongside our full year results in the autumn. For now, that's it from me, and I'll hand you back to Graeme Watt.
Thank you, Graham. Can we turn to slide 15, please? Just want to spend as I indicated earlier on, excuse me, a little bit of time on our social impact. Following on from that sustainability update, we'd now like to spend a little bit of time on our social impact to help you see what we've been up to and what's another area of great importance to us. At Softcat, we've worked really hard to create a naturally welcomed and valued and where every employee has a part to play in the future success of the company. Our focus on diversity and inclusion is as strong as ever as we aim to build a more diverse workforce over time. You've heard me say this before, excuse me, building diversity is absolutely the right thing to do and the smart thing to do, but it will take some time.
We care deeply about our customers, our employees, our partners, and communities, and I'm delighted that our execution against these priorities has remained undiminished through the period of the pandemic and the last time where we've acted with great agility and continue to place great importance on matters outside of the company as well as inside the company. Our diversity and inclusion initiatives are supported and driven by a wonderful community of network groups comprising of the Supporting Women in Business Group, BAME Group, our Pride Group, our Ex-Armed Forces Group, our Family Group, and our Faith Network too. All of these groups have driven some wonderful initiatives throughout the period to improve awareness of current day challenges and to publicize and celebrate the history of some minority groups, most recently from our LGBT+ Group and our Pride Network.
Around one-third of the entire Softcat team now are members of one or more of these networks, which offer a safe environment in which to share experiences as well as make plans for change. I have to say, it's been really lovely to see these networks increasingly work together during lockdown. I'm just going to take a glass of water. Excuse me. Thank you. In terms of next steps, we plan to add a disability and a neurodiversity network later this year. Next month, we are embarking on a company-wide allyship program. The aim of that program is that all of us can be better educated and be better equipped to be allies for every section of Softcat and our wider community. We're committed to driving our ethnic and gender diversity upwards throughout the company.
We were recently recognized in this year's Hampton-Alexander Review as one of only 152 companies who have met or exceeded the 33% target set for FTSE 250 organizations to address board-level gender balance. Softcat is ranked number 15 on the list and is the only technology business to appear in the top 100. We are intent on delivering a gender and ethnic diversity in our management layers that matches the representation we have throughout the rest of the company. I'm also pleased to announce that we've joined TCAR. TCAR stands for Technology Channel Against Racism, and we've joined TCAR as a founder member, and you'll hear more about that in due course. TCAR aims to build a community of U.K. tech organizations that commit to learn, share, and implement new ways of fostering an inclusive workplace.
Our mission is to rebalance racial representation in the U.K. tech industry by providing tools, resources, and support that enable tech companies to eliminate the barriers and transform their organizations. We've also placed an increasing importance on mental health over the last few years, in particular over lockdown. We now have 24 trained mental health first aiders in our ranks and have mental health support hotline service, which we've extended to the families of employees during lockdown. We've also established a buddy system for those who've requested to be connected to volunteers in the company, and we have more than 80 people currently supported by a buddy during lockdown conditions. I'm one of those volunteers, and I have two buddies in the company, and we regularly get together for a chat, which acts as a very welcome outlet to share perspectives on whatever's on our mind at the time.
We continue to raise money and get involved with Mind and the [Sedercanco] Foundation. The [Sedercanco] Foundation is a charity where we support a small community of tribals in Northeast India. After our successful recce trip there in November 2019, we can't wait to get back out there to help them further and give others in the company an amazing volunteering experience. Which is, I think, a nice segue into the partnership we've recently formed with a company called OnHand. OnHand provide a volunteering app that makes it easy to match those that need help to those that sign up and are willing to help. We've now had 200 staff members at Softcat sign up. We completed over 150 missions to date.
By signing up in large numbers and also across the country, we're also helping OnHand to expand their reach in the U.K. As you know, many more people are in particular need of help as a result of the pandemic, which has left lots of people feeling lonely and vulnerable. We've also been fortunate enough to be able to play our part in the vaccination rollout too, by giving up space in our Marlow office for the program. Well over 10,000 vaccinations have now been administered there. The publicity we've received has been a big surprise, but most welcome too. We've had several local celebrities receive their COVID-19 jabs in our office, and we've had many positive U.K. and global news items covering that initiative as far flung as Brazil.
I wanted to share briefly some feedback from one of our customers, and I quote here, "I'm hugely impressed with Softcat's decision to act as a COVID vaccination center. Both myself and my wife recently visited the office to have our first vaccination and were beyond impressed. This is an amazing example of Softcat having social awareness, taking responsibility, giving back, and delivering support during these trying times. It makes me proud to say I'm a customer of Softcat." It's just a very nice feeling to be able to help and do our bit. We've also been able to work with others to support initiatives to drive internet access into schools and homes, as well as donate devices to schools, families, and care homes. With that, if I can move to slide 16, please, our summary slide.
Despite COVID-19 pandemic, we have delivered a half with strong organic revenue and income growth. We've driven market share gains. We've declared an interim dividend, and we've executed against our strategy. We've invested throughout, and we've met the various challenges of the pandemic head on. We're confident in our strategy and in the market opportunities that are available to us in what remains a very fragmented market. We still have a lot to go after in terms of new customers and share of wallet in existing customers. We will continue to invest in our future growth, providing the skills and capacity that we need to support our customers in an ever-evolving and growing IT landscape. Whilst the breadth of product and services sets us apart from most in the market, being a Great Place To Work is our single biggest positive differentiator.
It's what makes us an exciting company to be part of, and it's the key ingredient of what enables us to deliver an outstanding experience to our customers. If we can move to slide 17, please, the outlook. I'm sure many of you on the call have already seen the outlook, but let me just read it out to you. Investment in our growth strategy has continued unabated throughout the pandemic, and we now carry good momentum into the second half of our financial year. Cost savings related to COVID restrictions are expected to dissipate over the next six months, but we are optimistic about the growth opportunity in our market. The board is confident that the company will deliver a full-year result significantly ahead of its previous expectations.
In conclusion, I'd just like to take a moment to thank all of the carers and other key workers across the U.K. and Ireland, in fact, globally, who have worked so tirelessly and so selflessly throughout the pandemic to keep us all as safe as possible and enable us to operate in the way we have. Thank you to them all. Finally, I would like to take one other opportunity, one further opportunity to thank the entire Softcat team, what they have achieved, both pre-pandemic and throughout the pandemic. Every single person has contributed to what has been a truly magnificent team effort, and we continue to benefit from the enormous power of working and feeling very much together. Thank you, guys. That concludes our prepared remarks for this morning.
Thanks.
I'd just now like to open the call for any questions in the time remaining. Thank you, Sharon.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press the hash key. Once again, please press star and one if you wish to ask a question. Your first question today comes from the line of Ross Jobber from Citi. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Good morning. Thanks for taking the call. Just a very quick one. It is obviously quite difficult to see how normality is going to return to trading conditions. The one area I think that is testing me particularly is this. I am very interested in your views on how you expect the public sector demand profile to play out over the next 12 months.
Yeah. Thanks, Ross. It's Graeme Watt here. We're pretty sure it's going to continue to play out as it is at the moment. I think there could be an expectation that says the public sector is spending way above and that's what's fueling some of our growth. We've seen public sector continue to remain strong. When I say continue to remain strong, it was strong coming into the pandemic. In the year, I think, prior to last year, FY 2019, I think we grew our public sector business by over 40% of revenue year-over-year. I think that reflects a desire from the government to invest and catch up the infrastructure or to close the gap, if you like, between public sector infrastructure and corporate infrastructure.
I think that was reinforced when Boris came to power and said that he particularly wanted to make sure that investment in health and education. He also reinforced a desire to invest in defense as well. If you look at where Softcat's come from historically, public sector is the
Most recent segment that we've targeted to take leadership in. We've invested incrementally in public sector to a certain extent over the other segments. That's been another factor in driving growth. I'd say a combination of all those factors, plus the fact that there seems to be no slowdown or no apparent decline in the government's appetite to invest in public sector. They need to digitally transform. They're investing in cloud, they're investing in software. We don't see that slowing down anytime soon. I think public sector demand will continue to operate at pretty robust levels for us. We don't see that tailing off at all. It's been strong for a while, and we just see that continuing.
Thanks very much.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Alastair Nolan from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Morning. Thank you for taking the question. I have two, please. The first is just around your kind of cloud business. Wanted to get a better sense of, do you have an estimate as to what percentage of your business is cloud now? Maybe just an update on the trends in terms of the growth you're seeing and what's driving that in particular in terms of kind of subsegments. Then, just on the SMB portion of your business, just wanted to get a bit more of an update as to what you're seeing there, kind of how the recovery is playing out and maybe how sustainable that is into the remainder of the year. That'd be great. Thank you.
Hi, Alastair. It's Graham Charlton here. I'll talk a little bit about the cloud piece, and then I think Graeme Watt will probably pick up on the mid-market question. It's a good question because defining cloud it doesn't get any easier. You can see our revenue versus gross invoiced income, that we're kind of moving towards a 50/50 split within software now. That's a pretty good proxy because we net down cloud-based SaaS software. We net down security software that relies on cloud updates as well, but some of that's deployed on premises. You could argue around where that should sit. We think a good proportion of our software business is now cloud. That's different vendor by vendor. The majority of our Microsoft business is now cloud, for example. Of course, there's other software vendors that deploy on premises.
Our public cloud business, where we're retelling the likes of AWS and Azure, is also growing. It's still a small proportion of our business overall, but growing at a very quick rate as well. We do expect to continue to see that expansion towards cloud being a feature of the landscape for us. I think you know that the majority of it, when it comes to SaaS based software, it doesn't really affect our financials. The vendors use incentive schemes and rebate schemes to nudge us towards selling through the licensing schemes that they want to move to. That tends to create the shift towards cloud as well with just with customer demand too. People like Microsoft are well advanced on that journey, but our role in the transaction and the financials around the transaction are really very similar.
Yeah, continued movement to cloud, both driven by SaaS software and resale of public cloud resources. Graeme, do you want to pick up on that?
Yeah, I think that all makes good sense. I think on the mid-market side, I mean, I can remember six months ago, we were asked a lot of questions about how mid-market was performing against enterprise, with a lot of people assuming or perhaps even hearing that the mid-market was kind of less robust in a sense. At that time, we had enterprise business and mid-market running at similar levels. Now mid-market for us has improved quicker than enterprise, as you can see in our reported numbers. I think what's going on there is a number of factors, Graham, you touched on them in your comments. I think we've got more of the more challenged verticals sitting in our enterprise business than we do in our mid-market business. That's one point.
I think we've seen growth in the mid-market in some of the tech, the finance, the insurance and legal professional areas, which is good. We did call out some larger deals that we experienced in the first half, and they seem to be in the mid-market. Now whether that's a catch up because people are seeing a roadmap out of the pandemic or whether that's just they were less one time in their nature and there's more to come, I think we'll have to look back in 6-12 months and call that more accurately then with the benefit of hindsight. What we are seeing in our mid-market customers is a willingness and appetite to invest during the pandemic so that they can come out stronger from the enterprise through then to compare against enterprise.
It just seems like the enterprise businesses, which are typically more in those challenged verticals, they seem to have big amounts at risk, if you like, on headcounts and what they spend on heads and what they have to spend on technology. They're being a little bit more cautious. I think they want to see a clearer roadmap before they're willing to turn that spend on. That's the kind of cautionary note in terms of the First half results, gives us something to look forward to. We don't think that demand from enterprises will snap back. We think it'll kind of come back in, roll back in slowly over time as different verticals and different individual companies see an appetite to invest again. Does that answer your question?
Yeah. That's really helpful. Thank you, guys.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Tintin Stormont from Numis. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Morning, guys. Just a couple of questions from me. On the vendor side, could you just perhaps describe vendor behavior during 2020 in terms of incentivization and support? Were they favoring their larger resellers? Are there particular vendors you would call out in terms of seeing particularly strong momentum? Secondly, just in terms of the investments you've made to broaden your capabilities, how much direct correlation are you making between that and the fact that you're landing these larger deals? I know you talked about pent-up demand, that could be kind of related to that. To some extent, it's also obviously happened at a time where you're offering more capability to your customers.
Yeah.
How confident, if you look at the pipeline going forward, do you think these sort of deals will feature more and more in Softcat's performance?
Thank you, Tintin. It's Graeme. I'll take the first one. It's Graeme Watt here. Around the vendors. I think Graham will pick up on the investment one. From a vendor point of view, I think generally speaking, vendors have been very supportive during the pandemic. They've gone out of their way. Different vendors have done different things. They've gone out of their way because it hasn't just been a pandemic that we've had to deal with. There's been some quite relatively sharp supply chain constraints as well based on the factors of pandemic disrupting assembly and manufacture, but also demand spiking, particularly around client devices, for example. We found our vendors very cooperative. They've, in some cases, taken away targets. In some cases, they've adjusted our performance against targets to reflect supply chain constraints. We haven't been penalized by supply chain constraint.
They've extended financing to our customers through us, and in some cases they've, although we haven't repeated it, to be frank, they've extended some additional credit to ourselves as well. A range of things that they've done around rebate and cash flows that has or could have really helped us through the period. I don't really like calling out individual vendors, if I'm honest, in response to your question. What I would say is that the vendors that have got the most momentum are the vendors that are operating in the spaces that have the most momentum. If I call out security, mobility, collaboration, cloud, those are all areas that are particularly accelerating, and the vendors that supply into those segments are doing well.
I think the last part of your question was, do we garner any kind of gain as being a large partner for our vendors? Yes, I think we do. It's really down to a couple of key areas which are linked, I would suggest, which is if the vendors have tight supply or if the vendors need to make sure that they're going to get the right quality of deployment, they need to be coming to partners like Softcat to guarantee the customer has a good experience. When they've got leads that they've generated, Softcat will be one of a small number of people they will come to deploy and fulfill those customer needs.
The other thing, of course, is that by virtue of our size and the investment we make in our capabilities, our capability levels and our accreditations are typically at the top end of what you can get from the reseller channel. When there are deployments that have higher than normal level complexity, again, it's people like Softcat that will be there ready to work with the vendor to take those solutions into the customer. It happens by virtue of our capabilities really more than the size we are with the customer, although I'm sure size counts, too. That's how I'd answer that.
Tintin, on the question about capabilities and our investment in capabilities and how that links to our winning bigger deals, I think there's a very strong connection. I've been at Softcat now for just over six years, and when I talk to our longstanding specialist salespeople, our technical design people, they will say that even compared to two or three years ago, our abilities today are night and day different, and our credibility for some of these more complex projects is anybody in the marketplace now. Whereas three or four years ago, maybe we were more transactional. That's been a very conscious effort on our part, really since we did the IPO and we took a good, hard, and probably for the first time, really quantitative look at the opportunity we have.
It really became very obvious that the formula we have had a huge amount of headroom for growth in it. We've invested aggressively to achieve that opportunity over time. Really, while we talked a lot about how we've expanded the sales team, the proportionately faster rate of growth in our employees has been in that technical area. Not just technical skills, but program management, project management skills. We do a lot of work for our customers now, not just procuring and advising, but also managing the implementation of projects over a period of time as well. Just didn't have those capabilities, those departments at all. Even beyond the technical and program management, the amount we've invested in export and multinational capabilities over the last few years as well has again played its part.
We have described in this period a clutch of large deals, and some of those were some of the biggest projects that we've done. We are in the frame for those sorts of things going forward as well. Competition, of course, is intense as it always is. The privilege that we have with this organic growth that we're generating and the ability that we therefore have to invest at every budget cycle is really, really great because as soon as our capabilities expand, there's a new area emerging, and we're always. I was talking to one of our longstanding data center guys, and networking guys the other day, who was telling me about an area that we're rubbish in as well. That's nice to know because it points to that future opportunity.
As an organization, I think we're good at is having a very close connection between our salespeople and our technical people and kind of being around ourselves. We're constantly that flow of opinion from our customers we're able to act. Yeah, our capabilities have been invested in directly to lead us to credibility in those large deals. We've had good success, but we see an awful lot more in the future as well, hopefully.
Great. Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of James Barr from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Hi. Morning. Yes. Three questions, please. Just on the addressable market, thinking about the investment you've been making over the last few years on that technical side of the workforce. When you talk about the 15%-20% wallet share you are today, in an overall wallet, what share would you consider yourselves best in class today? I guess how has that changed since IPO? That'll be the first question, please.
Just make sure I understand the question, James. When you say how much of that wallet do you think we'd be best in class, do you mean if the wallet's 100% in size?
Exactly. Yeah.
It's a difficult one to answer because apart from it being subjective, it's hard to assess perfectly the competition's capabilities. We know that we have some customers where we have a wallet share probably as high as 80 or 90%, and we only get to that point over a long period of time as well, and these are customers that have tested us against the competition. I think our proposition and the strength of our proposition is as broad and as deep as anybody's in the market. While I wouldn't dare to say that we're best in class because there's always smaller providers who are very, very good at what they do, and in the end, we're all selling the same stuff, so it's not like we can pretend to be unique in an area of capability.
We do in our culture, but not in our areas of capability. I think our proposition is as broad as deep in any in the market. I think the majority of that wallet share is what we can address very credibly. I think we're credible for at least 90% of somebody's wallet share. Graeme, I don't know if you think different.
I don't think differently. I think it's interesting because we've kind of set ourselves up. I think we said it in our script, James. We said, we want to be one of two leading, particularly for the larger customers. We want to be one of two leading reseller and trusted advisors to those customers because we don't think, particularly customers of scale, they're not going to put all their eggs into one basket.
I think if we're at, we said 15%-20% share of wallet, around about 17.5% today. I think we can reasonably expect over time to push that figure to over 50%, grow that three or four times over time. It does take time as we build that trust and loyalty over time that Graham referred to. I think one of the things that's in our favor is that all this technology that we serve, it's all getting increasingly integrated, and therefore, by virtue of the breadth of technology we got, we are more attractive to more customers rather than the specialists who come in and do the networking or the security or the connectivity or what have you.
I think we're seeing that as a little bit of a trend that we've seen over the last couple of years, where our customers, many of our customers are consolidating the number of resellers that they will work with. It makes it cleaner and easier for them and less complex, and they're consolidating the people that have the broader range of technology. I think that's probably in our favor, too.
Great, thanks. A second one, just on culture, and congratulations on the improved employee NPS score.
Thank you.
Having achieved that in a year of largely remote working, are you now more confident that, I suppose the aspects that drive culture are a lot broader than just the office environment, which you've always considered to be very, very
I think I'm more confident that from a technological point of view and a trust point of view and an empowerment point of view, that we can work effectively remotely. I speak for my leadership team here. We think there's a balance to be had. We think there's some great things that the individual and the company have benefited from remote working, but we think there's a lot of things that still require to go on in the office. As I said before, we're moving to a hybrid working structure. I think it's important that during the pandemic, we've lent on a culture that's been largely built up within an office. It's been constructed in the office and in a 100% office environment.
I think there's a number of people in the company who've joined since the pandemic who probably haven't seen and haven't lived and breathed the culture as much as the remainder of the company. I think that connection to the office is important. We still need to be we think, in the office for things like team meetings. We want people to be in the office for collaboration, for some of the training and development, whether it's vendor training, sales training, or other training. We want them to be It's been tough on the new guys to build the same depth of relationship and the same network inside the company. They've done an outstanding job, by the way. I think our managers have done an outstanding job in looking after our new starts. I think it's one or the other. I think it's both.
We're confident that we've managed periods during the pandemic of 100% remote working. We've ridden that storm pretty well. We've had to lean on the culture to do that, and I think we're confident that we've got working methodology, whether that's management, whether that's the way we construct the way we work, to continue to make the culture our number one asset. It's evolving, I think is really the way to say it, and it still remains just as important, but I'm confident that we can continue to make it important for the company.
I guess one of the things you pulled out again was about bringing the corporate and public sales best practice together.
Yeah.
How good do you think you currently are at bidding for those larger projects? Is there quite a lot of scope for process improvement and experience still required?
Well, we're clearly taking on larger and larger engagements in both enterprise and public sector. We're not looking to completely change. We haven't changed our enterprise strategy or our public sector strategy. We're just getting greater participation in more of the deals because we've built up the resources, as Graham was saying a second ago, and we built up credibility in the marketplace to be able to do those kind of engagements. I think what we've done by putting Anne Carr on as Sales Director of both public sector and corporate is both an internal piece where we were operating public sector quite independently of corporate.
That brings a lot of benefits if you don't get distracted, but there were certain pieces of things that we were doing exceptionally well in corporate and exceptionally well in public sector, which we're now taking across the divide, if you like. Anne's kind of sharing that best practice and some of those stuff that actually, funnily enough, as you're alluding to there, some of the stuff, the work and the diligence and the compliance and the governance work we need to do around some of those big engagements, even pre-bid. That was something that we did particularly effectively because we had to in public sector. We've now That commercial team covering bids and all of the complexity within some of our larger customer engagements, now is extended in a formal way across the corporate business as well.
Those are the sorts of sharing of best practice we expect to get from Anne sitting on top of corporate and public sector. So far, it's working really well. I mean, Anne's been in position now for nine months, and we're very pleased with the progress we're making there.
Sorry, one just quick final one. On your comment about the benefit you get from serving so many customers, is that something that's across the board, or is that really a benefit for the more complex projects in terms of drawing on that kind of experience?
I think what we get from dealing with so many customers is we get to see so many different scenarios and so many challenges. We get to, whilst we're not formally organized in corporate by verticals, we have built up quite a lot of verticals segment expertise. Whether that's legal or retail or construction or what have you. I think we can use that in a very responsible way, what we've learned, what the needs are of different sectors. We can bring that to bear with other customers in the same sector. It's very useful from that point of view. Of course, the breadth of customer, it kind of links into a question Tintin asked earlier on about vendors. That breadth of customer makes us exceedingly important to our vendors.
Our vendors can't replicate the relationship and the touch that we have with our 9,600 customer base. That creates a level of dependence and value, which is relevant for us from a vendor point of view too.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone keypad. Your next question today comes from Paul Quats from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Just two from my end. On the multinational side, can you give us some color around the average size of the customer? I think historically, maybe at least I tended to see it more as an enterprise business, but given the growth we're seeing in mid-market, it would suggest that there is a mid-market angle to that business. The second question that I had as well is really on public sector. We tend to see this as a set of revenues, but really within that, there's a number of obviously sub-segments within public sector. Could you give us a feel today of how the business is structured around the different verticals within public sector? What are the areas that you have basically a very strong footprint, and what are the areas where you think you can continue to grow your presence?
On the multinational point, if you think about when we talk about mid-market, we're talking about 200- 2,000, something in that region. Yes, you can have customers that sit in that space that can be multinational. I think you're right, Paul. The majority of those customers sit more comfortably in the enterprise space. As we said before, you asked about size. It's difficult to size it because there's this kind of halo effect. I'll make something up. We might do a very small deal with a customer in Singapore, which helps us secure a much bigger engagement in the U.K. The fact that we've got multinational capability is giving us access to the customer and to some significant projects within the customer.
That is both a defensive, if we don't have those capabilities, will we be able to retain some of our customers? An aggressive move in the sense that we will lose the opportunity to partner with some customers if we don't have that multinational capability. To answer your question, it's a range of all sizes of customers and all sizes of deals. I'm sorry if that sounds a bit vague, but that's exactly what it is. I think on the public sector side, so in our corporate sales structure, a corporate account manager can have a number of different customers of different sizes. Could be mid-market customers, can be enterprise customers, and can come from different verticals. As it happens, as they mature and their lifespan grows within Softcat as an account manager, they will slim down on the number of customers they have.
Quite often they'll lean towards a vertical. They'll have got quite skilled in a particular vertical, but there's no vertical structure in place in corporate. Any value that I was just chatting about earlier on about key verticals, it's like an overlay. We've got a chap that runs our enterprise business overall who has introduced working groups around certain verticals so that we can understand better what our customer needs are on verticals and take that value back to the customer. In public sector, however, we organize quite differently. We have education teams, and education is split into schools and then higher education. We've got blue light, which are all the emergency services. We've got local government, we've got central government, we've got healthcare, and a few other kinds of departments too.
Those teams are very definitely set up to have all the key skills and expertise that is needed to address each of those different segments. Probably unsurprisingly, we've seen most of our growth in health, education, and blue light. Those have been the three areas that have stood out for us in terms of growth. In terms of the final part of your question, where do we see opportunity? Frankly, in all of the areas. We haven't cracked any single one of those areas in public sector. They all offer good market opportunity going forward. We have called out defense particularly, and it was pleasing to see Boris and the Tory government talk about putting more money into defense recently. Central government and secure government, and bringing in Louise Fellows with the skills and expertise and experience she's got.
We see those areas as particular areas of growth within public sector.
Awesome. No, that's very clear. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your question coming from Pierre Fournier from Moneta Asset Management. Please go ahead, your line open.
For the result.
Thank you.
I would have three questions. One is more for detail, but in the report this morning, I could read that with the headcount growth of 12% to typically drive operating costs by 15%-18%. Is it the actual figure? My second question is regarding the number of new customers. The growth is 1.5%, which looks like a small figure if I compare it to the growth in invoiced income that grew by 20%. The question, I don't have the historical figures, but is it?
Yeah.
Compared to the history, a small figure or is it a regular figure?
Yeah.
In the future, would you rely more on increasing the gross profit per customer as you did, versus growing the customer base? The last question is regarding the public sector. It grew very much, as you mentioned, in the last two years, +40% in 2019, and recently a good figure. It looks like you are positive on the growth, so I guess you expect it could still grow nicely in 2022. Maybe you could confirm. The last question is regarding the public market. Could you give us, in your opinion, the addressable size of the public market versus the private sector that historically bigger at Softcat? Thank you very much.
Thanks, Pierre. We'll try and get through all of those. The first question you asked was about the 12% headcount growth and that driving slightly faster cost growth normally. The 12% is an actual number. We did grow in the period. Period-on-period headcount was up 12%. We'd normally expect that, therefore, to drive cost growth in excess of 12% because we obviously, we give pay rises. The 12% headcount increase drives a proportionate increase of cost. A lot of our other costs, travel, event costs, and so on, but of course, they're not present in the current period because of COVID-19. Another big part of our cost base is commissions, and gross profit growth of 20% would then add to that cost growth as well.
What we're just trying to make clear there is that the cost growth of just 9% in this period is lower than we would have expected.
Okay.
Five percentage points in rough terms. Is that clear for that first question?
Yep.
Yeah. Graeme, do you want to take it?
Yeah, I will. In terms of the new customers and what we expect to see in the future, I think we have been adding a more modest number of new customers in the last two or three years, I would say. I'd say for this particular period, that 1.5% increase to the customer base of 9,600, I've actually been rather pleased about that because there's kind of two things driving that number being still. Would we like it to be higher? Of course, we could do more. Even adding customers in the Pandemic has been difficult. It's been difficult to get to the right person that you need to speak to in a new customer. I think these new customers, as many customers have, they behaved in a way that said, "Actually, now is not a good time to be changing my trusted advisor on infrastructure.
I'll hunker down on the relationships I've got. When things are clearer with coming out of the pandemic, then maybe I can consider my options a little bit more fully. I think the fact that we've even been able to add 100 or so customers to the customer base has actually been quite pleasing. The other factor in there, of course, is that as we've been focusing some of our longer tenure, more mature, more experienced account managers on fewer accounts, there has been a limited cascade of accounts down through the rest of the organization. Some of those have hit our new starters who would normally spearhead that growth of new customers. They've been looking after existing customers a little bit more than usual, that's probably blunted their ability and time and bandwidth to pick up new customers.
In any given period, roughly, and I'll tell you exactly what happened in H1. In H1, 6% of our GP came from new customers and 94% came from existing customers. It doesn't have a big impact on current numbers. It's more building of that customer base and that future opportunity in the months and years out from here because it takes us a while to build up that share of wallet from a customer. In public sector, I'm just trying to think what your question was on public sector. Oh, yeah, for next year. We think public sector has been a strong business for a while, pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic. We don't really see any change to demand.
We've been plowing a lot of investment into public sector over the last five years or so and been taking share in that segment, and we would like to continue to do so further. I think the market opportunity we've got there, combined with continued spend in the U.K. in particular, I think they've been signaling that very clearly. I think public sector will continue to be a good opportunity for us. Graham, did you have any?
In terms of relative size of the opportunity, public sector, corporate, really hard to put a perfect kind of answer to that one, Pierre. We've said for a long time now, we think our gross invoiced income split between public sector and corporate would sort of reach maturity when public sector was of the order of 35% of gross invoiced income. We reckon that in those terms, the corporate market is more than twice the size of public sector. Margins on public sector are lower as well as they're bigger customers. They're buying slightly different, slightly more commoditized products, and they need less help and advice because they have large internal teams, and they club together in very sophisticated buying frameworks as well.
From a profit and a company earnings point of view, the size of that market would be something less than 35% of our total opportunity. It's that order of magnitude. Of course, some of the corporate market is unaddressable to us. Very, very small customers we don't address in the corporate market, and very, very large customers in the corporate market can buy direct from vendors in some instances as well. Hopefully, that gives you a broad order of magnitude.
Just a last follow-up. In the last years, while you had excellent growth in public sector, was it more due to the fact that public sector IT expenses soared? Is it more that you took market share to existing players?
I think it was more of the latter, Pierre. We started taking the public sector opportunity more seriously and resourced up to be able to have the capabilities that we needed to compete on the first frameworks that were on offer. I think it's more the latter. There is a sense that this has been in place for quite a few years now. There is a sense that public sector has been on a program of closing the gap in terms of its technology, closing the gap on some of the technologies that perhaps you see in the corporate world. It has been a focus for investment from the U.K. Government for a while now, so no real change. More us gearing ourselves up to be better able to serve in that segment.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Sharon, if I could just interject, please. I think we've got time for one more question, and then if there are any other questions, apologies for not being able to take them on this call today. Perhaps we can take them offline.
Thank you. Your final question today comes from the line of Benjamin May from Berenberg. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Good morning. Congratulations on a good set of results. Given it's only one question, I have a few, but I'll just ask one with regards to the U.K. budget. There's clearly incentives in the next two years for businesses to invest. IT CapEx sort of falls within that investment. We've heard some of your peers talking about the fact that it could pull forward some spend in the next two years, particularly amongst SMEs who perhaps didn't have such rigid timelines for when they wanted to make the investment but are happy to sort of exploit the opportunities over the next couple of years. Are you seeing any of that as of yet? Discussions with customers indicating that to you? Do you expect it to be a tailwind in the next two years or not?
Hi, Ben. It's Graham Charlton. Yeah, I certainly don't think it can be unhelpful to us. I have lost count of the number of things that have pulled forward IT spend over the last three or four years. I do kind of feel that there's probably going to be something else, another year or two that we might look at that could have that effect as well. I think the point is that IT infrastructure needs building, kind of on a worldwide basis, let alone just in the U.K. The tailwind that is that capital allowance deduction for particularly hardware, it will relate to some software as well, be more judgmental. Yeah, I think it will give another fillip to the industry. I think it might shift projects from maybe one type to another a little bit as well over time.
I don't think it'll be unhelpful, but I don't think it's in itself going to change our world as well. We've often talked about whether things like GDPR or Brexit or Microsoft refresh cycles are the things that are driving strength of numbers in any one period. The answer is always, not really in and of themselves, but they add to this cocktail of strength in our industry. I think this budget is just another example of that. It's helpful. The industry is in very good shape, notwithstanding that in any event.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. I will hand the call back for closing remarks.
Okay. Thank you. I don't really have any closing remarks other than thank you everybody for their time this morning, for your questions, and for your interest in Softcat. As I said before, if you do have any further questions or areas for clarification, do give Graham Charlton or myself a call at any time. Thanks again.
Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.