Graham Charlton

Graham Charlton became chief executive of Softcat, the Marlow-based IT reseller, in August 2023 after eight years as its chief financial officer. A chartered accountant who trained at Andersen, he joined Softcat in January 2015 from comparethemarket.com, where he was finance director. He took over from Graeme Watt, who stayed on as non-executive chair.

Riding the AI hardware cycle

In the six months to 31 January 2026, Softcat’s gross invoiced income rose 33.3% to £2.01bn and underlying operating profit rose 27.3% to £93.8m, according to its half-year results. Hardware did the heavy lifting: invoiced income from hardware grew 78.7%, against 18.6% for software and 29% for services. The customer base grew 3.5% to 10,400, so most of the gain came from existing customers spending more.

Charlton put the demand down to AI. Customers, he said in March, are “prioritising the building of the data, infrastructure and security foundations needed to deploy it effectively and at scale.”

The forecasts kept moving up. Softcat raised its full-year guidance for underlying operating profit three times in 2026: from low single-digit growth to high single-digit in March, to mid-teens in May and to high-teens in September.

A $1.05bn move into the US

On 17 September Softcat agreed to buy GDT, a Dallas-based IT solutions provider specializing in data centers, networking, AI infrastructure and cybersecurity, for an enterprise value of $1.05bn (£785m). It is funding the deal with cash, new debt facilities and a £354m share placing completed the next day. GDT has about 700 upper mid-market and enterprise customers and works with Cisco, NetApp and NVIDIA among others.

The deal needs US antitrust and foreign-investment clearance and is expected to close by the end of the first quarter of 2027. Softcat expects GDT to deliver about $80m of earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) in 2026.

Charlton said the acquisition, “which we’re executing from a position of strength, significantly accelerates our capability in the US”.

Why it matters to the channel

Softcat’s results are the clearest public read on UK channel demand, and they say AI budgets are flowing into infrastructure first. For vendors, a Softcat with a US arm becomes a larger transatlantic route to market. For UK rivals, it is a competitor with the reach to win more multinational work.

In three years as chief executive, Charlton has turned AI infrastructure demand into £2bn of invoiced income in a half year and used that position to take Softcat into the US.