NaTIONaL SUrVEY
of locations [across the country] to reach the customer face to face and
German pC market shares understand their needs. The consolidation will be ongoing and much stronger,”
Q407 pC shipments (000s units) & marketshare (%) Source: Gartner says Fritsche.
Brand Q406 Q406 Q407 Q407 % growth The efforts of resellers to maintain growth is not going unnoticed by
units m/s units m/s
vendors, and the channel is occupying an increasingly large mindshare at the
FSC 545 17 540 15.7 -0.9 A-brands. Although HP has put greater effort into the Germany retail market
Hp 349 10.9 429 12.5 22.7 of late with its relaunched consumer brand, Compaq, it says it is most proud of
acer 327 10.2 368 10.7 12.5 its increasing share of channel business. “We are quite happy with the German
Medion 252 7.9 281 8.2 11.6 channel,” says HP SPO boss Dorit Bode. “In FY07 we had double-digit growth in
Dell 263 8.2 280 8.2 6.5 the channel.”
Other 1,466 45.8 1,535 44.7 4.7 According to statistics from market research firm GfK, HP increased its
Total 3,433 100 3,202 100 7.2 share of channel activities across several key product sectors. In the notebook
hopeful of some consolidation among the distributors. “If we go into a valley space the share of HP sales in the channel increased year-on-year from 15% in
the question is, who is going to die first? There is a need in the market for January ‘07 to 18% in January ‘08. In desktops this grew over the same period
consolidation as we are all fighting for the same pie,” he says. from 20% to 23%, in servers from 59% to 64%. Part of this growth may be
Gerd Hundt’s Avnet was involved in one of the biggest M&As of the year, explained by its targeted approach to certain sectors of the market - first the
when it acquired Magirus’ HP and IBM infrastructure division. Although he sees Small Business Small Office (SBSO) space and now the mid-market.
consolidation continuing, Hundt believes it will occur at a slow pace: “There is FSC is taking a similarly proactive approach when it comes to the channel,
a trend towards consolidation, both for vendors and suppliers, but in Germany reckons recently-reappointed local channel boss Jörg Brünig: “Our strategy is to
everything moves slowly. The vendors will be happy if there is consolidation in grow hand-in-hand with our distribution partners. They are a primary part of
the channel.” our strategic sales direction. We want to continue to nurture our long-standing
With all the changes happening at distributor level, resellers are continuing strategy of working with partners, with intelligent concepts, through ongoing
to evolve in search of margins and value-add. The path from traditional reseller optimisation of our processes and through fundamentally supporting the
to VAR and beyond is well-trodden in Germany and, according to Bechtle channel with innovative themes, such as Green IT and Managed Office.”
spokesman Thomas Fritsche, the second-tier channel is also undergoing a spot
OUr aNaLYSIS
of consolidation. Things sure aren’t going to get easier in the German channel, but
“A few companies which have good access to the SMB sector will show distributors and resellers can take heart from the amount of effort vendors
better progress than the rest of the market. It is key to get a wide network are putting into working with partners. On the vendor front Germany
appears to be abandoning its favouritism for local brands, with Hp and
IT hardware shipments in Germany
acer seeing a fair bit of joy, though FSC is sure to strike back on its home
Source: EITO forecast turf. The e-tail/retail battle will continue to develop over the coming years,
Sector 2007 units 2008 units % change with bricks and mortar stores holding firm for the time being.
Servers 398,121 411,204 3.3 and on the distributor front - well, even though consolidation is clearly
PCs Total 9,995,558 11,016,752 10.2 needed it’s hard to see who will flinch first. Ingram Micro has huge scale in
- Portable 5,041,478 5,843,147 15.9 Germany, actebis would hardly abandon its domestic market, Tech Data
- Desktop 4,954,080 5,173,605 4.4 has a war chest ready stashed away and aLSO is the fastest-growing of
Printers/MFPs 7,779,826 7,783,754 0.1 the quartet. We also haven’t heard the last from actebis, and it will be
LAN cards 20,199,170 23,269,115 15.2 interesting to see how the ICT distribution experiment will work out.
18 apr 2008 25
It0807 - 22-25_GERMANY_SME.indd 25 2008-04-16 11:05
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