Fresh evidence emerged yesterday that the credit crisis is hitting companies' technology budgets and jobs as a leading IT services firm said it was bracing itself for far tougher times.

Computacenter, which provides computer services to large companies and governments and investment banks, said that difficult trading in the UK and France could lead to profits in the first half of this year expected to be slightly below those for the same time last year.

Its UK like-for-like sales fell by 1.5 per cent in the first three months of 2008, while sales outside the UK were down 7.1 per cent in local currency to €332.8 million (£265 million), mainly because of weak sales in France.

Mike Norris, chief executive of Computacenter, said the company had contended with five fewer trading days this year than usual because of the timing of Easter and New Year's Day, and blamed the decline in French sales on tighter government spending under President Sarkozy.

But Mr Norris admitted that companies searching to cut costs often looked at trimming their IT spending.

He told The Times: “There's no doubt that if you have an economic downturn, IT spend will be hit.

“On the other hand, I think that we are in a very different environment to the dot-com slowdown. People have not been spending [as] crazily on IT the way they were then. If they have been spending sensibly on IT, big cuts won't need to be made.”

Computacenter is sticking to its forecasts for the full year as it believes sales will improve between July and the end of December. Sales at its German business increased in the first quarter of this year.

The company will also benefit from the strong euro, as a large part of its business is in continental Europe. Its sales are traditionally lower in the first half of the year. Last year's first-half pre-tax profit of £14.5 million made up a third of the profit for the whole year of £42.5 million.

Computacenter's share price fell by 10 per cent yesterday as several analysts cut their forecasts or issued negative research on the business.

Piper Jaffray cut the stock to “neutral” from “buy”. The broker said the statement suggests the group is slightly below its estimates for 2008 revenue.

Julian Yates, analyst at Investec, said that it was clearly not an optimistic statement and reiterated his “sell” rating. He said the company needed a material improvement in the economic outlook leading to a significant increase in tech spending.

Gartner, a US technology consultancy, has forecast that the US-led slowdown will lead to a greater emphasis on reducing IT costs.

The company said that this could lead North American and European buyers of information technology services to use more labour in lower-cost countries such as India.

Last week Hewlett-Packard unveiled plans to buy rival Electronic Data Services for $12.6 billion.

Some analysts interpreted the agreed deal as a defensive move designed to shore up revenues and future orders in the face of more difficult conditions.

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