Since its inception last autumn, our smart small-cap series has focused on companies that are, well, smart. We’ve featured a contractor that is helping to build a “vertical city” in the Saudi Arabian desert; a youth publisher that is raking in billions of views; and an engineering firm searching for new ways to extinguish lithium battery fires. This month’s choice, however, is “reassuringly boring”, according to Indriatti van Hien, deputy fund manager at the Henderson Smaller Companies Investment Trust.
Or rather – it should be.
Restore (RST) makes most of its money from box storage. It collects documents from organisations across the UK and stows them away in everything from modern industrial units to aircraft hangars and former stone mines. In total, it has 22mn boxes across 100 facilities and serves over 80 per cent of the FTSE 100. If this all sounds a bit low-tech, the company also has a digital arm which scans paper records and converts them into a computerised format. Ultimately, though, the work isn’t cutting edge – but it's stable, recurrent and generates a lot of cash.