News

Brightstar Europe appointed master distributor for OtterBox protective solutions
2011-09-21
Telephony specialist Brightstar Europe, a joint venture between Brightstar and Tech Data, has signed a pan-European limited master distribution agreement with OtterBox, a provider of protective cases for smartphone handsets and tablet devices. Limited because Ingram Micro keeps its direct contract with Otterbox and will not buy its products through Brightstar. The agreement will cover the full range of OtterBox products and extend to all European countries that Brightstar Europe and Tech Data have a presence, that is Austria, Belgium/Luxembourg, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom (Denmark, Portugal and Switzerland being the latest to be - quietly - opened). It provides distributors, operators, retailers and resellers with access to the extensive logistics capabilities of Brightstar Europe and Tech Data, enabling them to extend availability, meet customer needs and maximize opportunities with OtterBox protective solutions.

Distributors lose industry share in 2011
2011-08-31
According to the last Canalys report, the growth of the distributors does not match those of the rest of the industry. The Canalys IT Industry major vendor (Apple, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Lexmark, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP) grew revenue 18% worldwide on average in the first quarter of 2011. In comparison, the big four distributors (Arrow ECS, Avnet TS, Ingram Micro and Tech Data) managed 11%, with many smaller distributors faring worse than this. Distributors have blamed recent disappointing results on excess inventory, poor retail demand, sluggish sell-out and weakening economies. They have comforted themselves by making peer group comparisons where sales-out data shows "we are performing as well as the others, so please blame the market for our results, not us!" And while these reasons are valid justifications, Canalys argues that distributors need to see the bigger picture and realize that for the first time in a decade industry trends are conspiring against them.

According to the report, distribution thrived for the last 10 years thanks to rapid notebook and netbook adoption and the virtualization of the server room, with two-tier distribution at the heart of the routes-to-market for both B2B and B2C vendors. But the growth drivers of the industry have now changed. Mobility is still booming, but now on the back of smaller devices, notably smart phones and pads, which are more and more sold either directly or through service providers. The server and storage markets are healthy, driven by data center activity and cloud applications. On top of these industry changes, the world economic growth is mainly coming from economies beyond Western Europe and the US, where the top 4 distributors are at best weak, at worse absent (MEA, Russia, Japan, etc.) : in these countries, local distributors will outgrow them, with already some local giants like Merlion in Russia for example. All of these factors combined are set to cause headaches for distributor executives for at least the next two years. The report concludes with a list of recommandations for the distributors to follow, if they wish their growth to match the industry, one of which is to go East as soon as possible…

BrightStar fades as it lost its head
2008-09-04
Germany : Michael Møller, who joined BrightStar just eight months ago, has left the company. He is replaced by Günther Schiessl who is also product marketing director for broadliner Tech Data and will also manage Brightstar operations in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Among cited reasons, a too slow development partly due do Scribona purchase and commuting difficulties. This is also a sign of a strategic failure to implement Brightstar model in Germany. In fact, presently, Brightstar Europe seems to run successfully only in Spain and United Kingdom, which is a bit limited for a pan-european-would be company (source : Computer Reseller News Danmark).