Avnet promotes corporate officers
2011-12-22 United States : multispecialist Avnet has unveiled two corporate officer promotions. Steve Phillips, CIO, has been promoted to a corporate officer position of senior vice president for Avnet, Inc. from vice president. In addition, Graeme Watt, president of Avnet Technology Solutions EMEA, was elected as a new corporate vice president for Avnet, Inc.
Eizo leaves Avnet
2011-12-21
Monitor vendor Eizo Nanao has decided to establish two wholly-owned subsidiaries in Germany and the United Kingdom, to expand its sales and marketing activities in Europe. The subsidiaries will operate in 14 countries where EIZO is currently represented by Avnet Technology Solutions, namely Austria, Belux, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia and the United Kingdom. The transition of current business from Avnet to Eizo will occur on January 1, 2012 in the United Kingdom and July 1, 2012 in other countries. Avnet has represented Eizo as its exclusive distributor in 14 countries in Europe for 26 years and has played an integral role in building a solid customer base and strong brand awareness there. However, as Eizo further expands into vertical markets and develops business with global customers, it has realized the need to represent itself as a single entity with one direct supply channel. For instance, customers in the industrial and air traffic control markets require long-term product supply which entails direct communication with the manufacturer. Eizo and Avnet have mutually concluded that Eizo should assume responsibility for all sales and marketing responsibilities as well as the entire customer base from Avnet and, in some cases, Avnet teams dedicated to Eizo (to ease the launch of its activities in the aforenamed countries). In other countries like France, Poland or Spain, Eizo will retain its local distributors (namely, Feeder, Alstor and Aryan).
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…
