Hey just wanted to thank you for all your help.
In the end I called up Microsoft Support as this issue was critical and needed to be resolved quickly as I would have had 75 angry laptop users.
Ok so the problem was: As the 75 laptops had been imaged exactly the same, it meant the CMID of each laptop was exactly the same. When the clients sent requests to the KMS server the count would not increase.
In order to resolve it: you have to run the slgmr -rearm command on every single laptop and then slmgr -ato to activate it. Once more than 25 were activated, all started activating so everything was fine.