Cutbacks kill Unimac

Financial difficulty has forced Apple reseller Unimac to close its doors after seven years in business.

The education specialist, based at Sydney’s University of New South Wales, ceased trading on Friday.

Administrators have not been appointed for the reseller. The company had a staff of five including managing director, Doug Ingram.

With sales of Apple-gear to the university itself declining 40 percent between June 2004 and June 2005, the company had little choice but to cease trading, Ingram said.

"One of the big Mac buying faculties overspent on everything in 2004 so they had financial shackles placed on them," he said.

"The school computer science [department] is also cutting back as the pre dot bomb students are finishing up so their enrolments are down."

The reseller was also struck a blow when it had its authorisation to resell Adobe’s products to the university withdrawn last year, Ingram said.

"By some black-magic process, our Adobe licensing business went elsewhere and that was a pretty important profit stream for us," he said.

Apple’s policies toward the reseller channel – in particular its decisions to remove reseller access to student discounts on iPods – had also played a role in the dealer’s demise, Ingram said.

"Apple has been a competitor to us," he said. "He we are on campus and we can't even offer students a discount for iPods and Mac accessories."

Given the cash-strapped nature of the average university student, developing a services portfolio to counter declining hardware sales was not an option, Ingram said.

Ingram said a national education-focused reseller was due to take over the current Unimac site in February. Ingram himself would also take up a role as account manager with the new reseller.

"These guys already look after universities in other states so they have economies of scale and other profit streams,” he said. A downturn in one customer doesn't affect the business to the extent it affected me."

Ingram said the Apple channel could learn from the store’s demise and advised it not to chase one big fish and to quickly learn how to anticipate Apple’s changes.

"I can't help wondering that if [Apple] had kept an eye out and given me a hand whether things might have been different," he said.

"They call us channel partners but I made a comment to them that if I treated my partner the way they (Apple) treated me I'd be divorced years ago."