The CEO of one of Europe’s largest providers of storage and AI infrastructure this morning predicted spiking memory prices will fuel a “short-term boost” in sales.
Proact CEO Magnus Lönn said customers are likely to bring forward purchases “before the price increases fully hit the market” as he unveiled its full-year results.
The Sweden-headquartered NetApp, Microsoft and VMware partner saw revenues dip 3.8% to SEK 4.68bn (£384m) in calendar 2025.
The UK bucked this trend by growing revenues 7.3% to SEK 760.8m (£62.4m), mainly thanks to its acquisition of London-based Azure specialist BlakYaks (for up to a cool £26m).
“We will most likely see an uplift”
Proact generates just over half of its sales from its core systems business, which sees it design, acquire and install infrastructure.
Pre-empting a question he acknowledged would be on the lips of the analysts, Lönn played down the impact of rising memory prices.
The channel has been told to prepare for “pandemic levels” of shortages in 2026 as AI datacentres gobble all the kit, with HPE only last week tweaking its Ts & Cs to enable price adjustments “up to the day of shipment”.
But on the call, Lönn stressed Proact doesn’t buy before it has sold something, “meaning that we inform our customer around the new price, and then we negotiate as good as we can”.
“So we as a company don’t take any risk around that,” he said on the call, a transcript of which can be found here.
“The impact of it is that I think, short term, we [will] probably most likely see an uplift in our coming sales, because many customers would like to buy before the price increases fully hits the market.
“But of course, you can think about the long-term impact, because at the end of the day, somewhere our customer needs to find the money and pay for it.
“But I think in the area that we are working with – critical infrastructure – it’s very hard for customers not to prioritise that. So I think short term it will probably see a boost of it, and long term it will maybe be a little bit more savings.”
“Clear execution gaps”
Having just completed his first year as Proact CEO, Lönn acknowledged he can see” some clear execution gaps” in the 1,100-employee outfit’s performance.
It has “not been good in creating profitability outside our Nordic business”, he said, conceding that profits have been going in the “other direction” outside its home region.
Proact has introduced a number of measures to counteract this, including implementing a new light-touch “post M&A model”.
This has already worked well with BlakYaks, which Lönn characterised as “a really good addition to our UK business”.
“We are not spending internal time integrating an acquired company,” he explained.
“Instead we are investing all our effort and time in making sure that we focus on sales and what additional value that we can bring to our customer.”
Other steps Proact is taking include investing “even more” in high-margin services (it last year launched its AI and Kubernetes offering).
