eXeed enters administration

Mobility distributor eXeed Australia has confirmed it has closed its doors and officially gone into administration following the departure of its last major vendor, Hutchison 3, in September.

The company has set up a recorded message for callers to its Melbourne phone number: “[eXeed] is no longer trading.” Creditors were advised to call chartered accountant GS Andrews & Associates for further details.

Michael Bosnar, managing director at eXeed, said the distributor had about four or five creditors. He was not yet at liberty to disclose who they were or how much money was owed.

Basically, the distributor had been a sound company but, unsurprisingly, found it impossible to keep trading without any vendors, he said.

“We just decided that without any contracts, it was difficult to sustain. So we closed it down,” Bosnar said.

Hutchison had been working with eXeed for nearly a year but had reviewed its channel offering after resellers had failed to support the 3 offering via eXeed, Bosnar said.

“We were focusing on IT and telecommunications convergence. But the channel didn’t take off,” he said. “We then set up a direct business, because we couldn’t get the channel to take on telecommunications products.”

Then Hutchison had axed eXeed, preferring to concentrate of its Vodafone partnership, leaving the distributor with few alternatives.

He said vendor decisions could affect the livelihood of channel partners and their staff, he said, and Australia – seen as a mature market without the exciting opportunities offered by, say, China or India – often got short shrift.

“Vendors make these decisions without fully understanding the repercussions on the market,” Bosnar said. “I’m not having a go at any particular vendor. I think it’s across the board.”

Vendors in Australia had been “chasing their tails”, first seeing whitebox as the biggest threat, then targeting Dell, and also the channel. “They’ve got their focus all over the place instead of in one direction,” he said.

Bosnar has been overseas in recent weeks investigating new opportunities in places like China, but could not yet confirm his own future direction, he said.

Doing business in the channel was getting more difficult, he added, especially since there was only one major distributor. Bosnar also hinted a new rival might enter the Australian market in the near future, but would not be drawn on further details.

Two other eXeed divisions – eXeed Global and mobility reseller V2B – would keep operating. All eXeed Australia staff had been “taken care of”, Bosnar said, with most taking up positions at eXeed Global or V2B.

Distributor eXeed New Zealand, run by Andrew Bain, was an entirely separate company in all but name, Bosnar added.