Th rise in home working saw revenue surge by more than €200m and profits jump by almost €120m at the famed printer, scanner and sewing machine maker, known by many as the 1990s shirt sponsor of Manchester City, during its latest financial year.
Brother International Europe, which is headquartered in Greater Manchester, has reported a revenue of €930.7m for the 12 months to March 31, 2021, up from €738.3m.
The Tameside firm, whose parent company’s headquarters are based in Japan, has also posted a pre-tax profit of €160m, a rise from €42.7m.
READ MORE: Brother UK boss on 'painful' Covid decisions, firm's bright future - and famous Man City link
However the UK arm, which is also based at the Greater Manchester headquarters, reported a revenue drop from £91.6m to £45.6m while its pre-tax profits fell from £3.3m to £2.4m.
A statement signed off by the board said: "Results for 2020/21 fiscal year finished much stronger than our initial forecasts projected after the Covid outbreak.
"Whilst the office printing market declined with the various lockdown measures taken across Europe, the shift to work from home created a huge demand for printing, multifunction and scanner devices suitable for home use.
"The first quarter of the fiscal year has a significant heavy downward impact to the result with many of our contractual printing customers closing their offices, many new projects for new devices put on hold or cancelled and the roll out of already won business delayed.
"The number of printed pages declined quite significantly.
"This was felt across all areas [of] our business in the initial three months of the year, after which we started to see recovery and in the case of our small office/home office offerings a significant increase in demand, way in excess of our original budgeted targets.
"The impact of Covid was felt across the whole Brother group and impacts were seen in our production facilities that had varying impacts, from complete closure at sometimes, to limited production in orders."
