Distribution dukes out for PC share

Ingram Micro, Tech Data and Synnex are battling for PC market share amid some intense price competition in North America.

Kevin Murai, co-president of Ingram Micro, said the PC market environment had got more competitive.

"Today we see it as more so than a half year ago," he said. "Everybody is more competitive. We've not seen a one-distributor action. There is a little manoeuvring of share going on."

John Paget, chief operating officer at Synnex, said the market was "continuing" to be competitive.

"There's no question about that. I'd be hard-pressed to say it's more competitive than in the past nine months, but I would classify it as a very competitive market," he said.

Murai also said the peripherals space—especially printers—had been particularly cutthroat in the past few months. Also, the PC price competition came from other distributors and not from PC vendors' direct business, he added.

Peripherals distributor Tech Data could not be reached for comment.

For several quarters, Ingram had maintained that it would not chase business opportunities below a certain margin, but that may have changed in the fourth quarter as it tried to stave off market-share losses to Synnex or Tech Data.

"Synnex and Ingram Micro will do whatever it takes to get my business," said Michael Simmons, president of MAS Enterprises, a US reseller.

Synnex was still the cheapest, Simmons said. "If they had everything I wanted, they'd get 99 percent of my business. But Ingram has been much better recently."

Ingram Micro's North America sales increased two percent in the fourth quarter ended 1 January, but the company wouldn't say which products did best.

"When you look at the two percent growth year over year in 2003, our year-ago quarter, we had extra selling days, we had an extra week, and we also had especially strong business licensing a year ago," Murai said.

Synnex's global fourth-quarter sales increased 18 percent from the year-ago quarter. That distributor also does not break out sales by region or product category, but analysts said it appeared Synnex PC sales had outpaced those of Ingram.