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Avnet raises the bar for Ingram and Redington
The entry of Avnet Technology Solutions in the tier-1 distribution space has brought relief to many
enterprise products vendors.
With just two distributors at the top—Ingram and Redington—many vendors were feeling constrained in expanding their channel base. Also, Ingram’s alleged conservative approach to distributing value-added products meant that most vendors with aggressive channel strategies had to rely heavily on Redington to roll out their market expansion initiatives.
But the advent of Avnet has changed the scenario. In a short period, the new distributor has partnered with bigwigs like HP, IBM, Juniper and VMware. Also, the company has rolled out several new services initiatives that the incumbent tier-1 distributors lack.
Avnet’s crystal-clear focus on value-added products has also been well-appreciated by vendors. The distributor has a worldwide policy of not distributing volume products like PCs and printers.
Avnet has surely raised the bar for the incumbents, and even if it may take years to reach where Ingram and Redington are in terms of turnover, there is no doubt that it will make life difficult for the two distributors in the value-added space.
Memory distributors mint money
 A few memory resellers and distributors have minted money by stocking memory products which, in the last 30 days, have risen by almost 30 percent. The trend is across all types of memories from flash to DRAM, and not limited to any specific memory type.
A couple of memory distributors have minted crores due to the sudden rise in memory prices. Prices of memory, as all of us know, had hit the lowest ebb in the first quarter of this year with 1 GB DDR2 modules available at under Rs 500 in the spot market.
Many memory distributors had bought large stocks expecting the prices to go up. The memory distributors now believe the prices will go further northward and expect to make more profits. Good luck to them, but Shadow’s advice to them is to book profits at the earliest. After all, what if the prices go down again? |