Ingram Micro moves in on Asia Pacific market
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Technology distributor Ingram Micro has announced that it has signed an agreement to purchase Australian based company Tech Pacific for AU$700 million, in a move designed to strengthen its Asia Pacific presence.
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EMC&#39;s Asian operations are back on track after sluggish growth during early 2006, and the company aims to take Asian market share away from rivals and push into new market segments.&quot;We went from worst to first,&quot; said Steve Leonard, president of Asia-Pacific and Japan, explaining that Asia went from being EMC&#39;s slowest-growing region in 2006 to its fastest in 2007.EMC&#39;s Asia-Pacific revenue grew 24 percent during 2007, hitting $1.46 billion. By comparison, revenue from Asia grew by just 6 percent during 2006, which was lower than previous years and far slower than EMC&#39;s growth in other regions during that period.Gartner and IDC pegged Asian storage revenue growth at around 23 percent during the third quarter, the most recent period for which figures are available.&quot;We see EMC very well placed as a storage vendor in Asia,&quot; said Avneesh Saxena, group vice president of systems, storage, and software research at IDC Asia-Pacific, citing EMC&#39;s improved channel relationships and &quot;software-driven approach&quot; to developing storage products. &quot;They aren&#39;t just selling boxes,&quot; he said.Even so, taking storage market share away from rivals won&#39;t necessarily be easy for EMC, Saxena said, noting IBM and Hewlett-Packard are firmly entrenched in key Asian markets.EMC&#39;s turnaround&#160;is largely a credit to Leonard, who was hired in 2006 and given the job of transforming its Asian operations.Getting the company back on track in Asia involved a variety of steps, including shaking up the company&#39;s sales teams and building stronger ties with channel partners. EMC also embarked on an aggressive expansion in India and China to spur growth in these markets and tap into the vast pools of engineering talent there.&quot;We effectively had zero software-engineering capabilities resident in China during the summer of 2006. I was just up in Beijing and we are going to hire our 1,000th engineer this quarter,&quot; Leonard said.Looking ahead, EMC is counting on new products that tap user demand for information storage, content-management capabilities, and security to spur further revenue growth in Asia. In a break with EMC&#39;s traditional sales focus on large corporations and organizations, the company also plans to expand into new markets, offering storage products and services for small business and even consumers.At the top end of the market, EMC hopes to generate more sales with a line of flash memory-based drives, announced last month, designed to replace some disk drives in the company&#39;s Symmetrix storage arrays.&quot;EMC is in a very high innovation cycle right now. It&#39;s been bringing more things out to the market than at any moment in its history,&quot; Leonard said.While the woes of early 2006 are now history for EMC, the company still faces challenges in Asia. In particular, Japan remains a difficult market.EMC is working to improve its Japanese operations, but it will take time for these efforts to yield the desired results, Leonard said, calling the company&#39;s transformation there a &quot;work in progress.&quot;&quot;We&#39;ve had dozens and dozens of meetings with executives from leading Japanese companies, essentially to say, &#39;We&#39;re committed to being a better local company, we&#39;re asking for your support,&quot; he said.As part of these efforts, EMC turned to sport to help raise its profile in Japan. The Massachusetts-based company is sponsoring the Boston Red Sox baseball team&#39;s upcoming March visit to Japan and will use the occasion to woo prospective customers and partners. Baseball is very popular in Japan and Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka is a celebrity in his home country, where he played professionally for several years.&#160;
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Search giant will also expand this week into key markets in Asia, Canada and Europe.
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Distribution giant Ingram Micro Inc has acquired Australia&#39;s largest IT distributor Tech Pacific in a $700 million (US$493 million) cash deal.
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(InfoWorld) - AT&TÂ is positioning itself to become a key provider of global communication services in China, India and Vietnam, three of the world's fastest growing economies, executives said at a telecommunications event in Hong Kong. "China is the fastest growing market for AT&T," Ronald Spears, senior vice of business sales at AT&T Global Services, said Tuesday during a news conference at Telecom World. "We're not only supporting businesses going into China but increasingly Chinese companies that require global communication services." AT&T remains the only foreign telecommunications company to have an equity stake in a local operator, Unisiti, a joint venture with China TelecommunicationsÂ (China Telecom) that provides broadband IP (Internet Protocol) services, according to Spears. In mainland China, the U.S. company operates four nodes that support services such as ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), VPN (virtual private network), and frame relay in addition to IP. Additional nodes are in Hong Kong and Taipei. India, AT&T's second fastest growing market, generates the most business for the company in the Asia-Pacific region, according to Spears. And the company is taking steps to further increase its business in the country where businesses that offer outsourcing services are generating huge demand for communication services. Last month, AT&T became the first foreign telecommunications company to receive licenses for national long distance and international long distance telephone services in India. Early next year, newly formed AT&T India plans to provide VPN services to multinational corporations, IT-enabled service companies and business process outsourcing providers in the country, according to Steve Lowe, vice president of AT&T Asia Pacific. Last month in Vietnam, AT&T agreed to partner with Vietel to offer local enterprises and an increasing number of multinational companies VPN and frame relay services, with plans to introduce additional services in the near future. Currently, AT&T serves more than 1,000 corporate customers in the Asia-Pacific region, with more than 33 nodes in 14 markets. Telecom World, which is organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency, runs through Friday.
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Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c51109)  has announced the addition of Chemicals in Asia-Pacific to their offering  The Chemicals in Asia-Pacific industry profile is an essential resource  for top-level data and analysis covering the Chemicals industry.
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Dell Inc. , the world&#39;s  second-largest computer maker, said on Thursday it will soon  start selling its laptops and desktops at Asian retail chains  and stores.
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SANTA ANA, Calif. (Dow Jones)--Ingram Micro Inc. (IM), the world&#39;s No. 1 wholesaler of computer components and peripherals, signed a definitive agreement to buy Australian information-technology distributor
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Qualcomm , the world's top  mobile chip designer, said on Wednesday China recently passed  Japan to become its second largest Asian market, as it unveiled  a major tie-up with leading smartphone maker HTC .
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Hard Times with Ingram Micro Is there no end to this company's ambitions? Google has signed up Ingram Micro, the world's biggest IT wholesaler, to distribute its hardware search appliance box in the US.â¦
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A look across the Pacific for stock ideas.
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Complementary metal oxide semiconductor power amplifier (CMOS PA) provider Axiom Microdevices Inc. announced today that it has appointed Raymond Wang as director of Asia Pacific (APAC) sales, and Taiwan-based electronics distributor Watson-Bell Co.
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(InfoWorld) - Ingram Micro will distribute Google's Search Appliance and Google Mini enterprise search devices, a deal intended to accelerate sales of the products, the companies announced Wednesday. Google, which has sold about 9,000 of the devices to date, expects the distribution deal with Ingram to boost sales in particular among SMBs. Ingram, with its distribution network of more than 165,000 retailers and resellers worldwide, is also expected to help increase sales internationally as well as in the government and education sectors. "The only way to meet the growing demand for the products is to go through channels," said Rodrigo Vaca, channel marketing manager of the Google Enterprise unit. Vaca declined to provide details of the effect Google hopes the deal will have on sales. "We expect this to have a significant impact," he said. Google already has deals in place with regional distributors in Japan, Australia, and parts of Latin Americaand expects the Ingram relationship to be complementary to those arrangements, Vaca said. The Ingram deal will initially focus on the U.S. and will expand to other regions like Latin America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific later this year, he said. So far, Google has sold the products almost exclusively via its own direct sales staff in the U.S. and Europe. "Our strategy is to have our direct sales force work hand-in-hand with the channel," he said. As part of the agreement, Ingram will provide sales assistance, marketing resources, credit help, and technical support to the resellers that carry the Google products. The Ingram deal isn't exclusive, Vaca said. In a news release, Ingram, which distributes hundreds of thousands of IT products from about 1,400 suppliers, said the deal strengthens the menu of wares it can offer to its channel partners. The Search Appliance and Google Mini are server-side hardware devices loaded with Google's search engine software designed to let companies index and find information stored on corporate servers. Although Google generates most of its revenue from search engine advertising in the consumer market, company officials have said they are committed to its Enterprise unit, which, in addition to the search devices, also markets business software. The Google Mini, designed for SMBs or departments within large organizations, starts at $1,995 with a capacity to index 50,000 documents. It tops out at 300,000 documents. The Search Appliance, which is more powerful and has more features, starts at $30,000 with a 500,000-document capacity and tops out at 30 million documents. The Google products typically cost less than more sophisticated enterprise search products and are designed to be easier to install, manage, and use. However, analysts generally agree that the Google products don't match the feature set of high-end enterprise search products from companies like Autonomy and Fast Search & Transfer.
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Microsoft has expanded its initiative to provide a low-cost distribution of Windows in Asia. Although the program was originally directed exclusively toward social welfare programs in Thailand and Indonesia, it will now be expanded to Malaysia. The software will be available in all three countries by October.
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Dell Inc., the world's second-largest computer maker, said on Thursday it will soon start selling its laptops and desktops at Asian retail chains and stores.
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Acer, the world&#39;s third largest PC vendor, is taking aim at Japan this year as a key place to grow its booming business, the company chairman said.The Taiwanese company plans to extend its business model of working closely with, and sharing profits with, distributors, to Japan, where companies such as Sony and Toshiba dominate the market, Acer Chairman J.T. Wang told local media in Taipei. An Acer representative confirmed the statements.Acer also plans to release new products in the second or third quarter of this year aimed at ultra-mobility and the low-cost segment of the PC market, Wang said.The Acer representative declined to provide further details on what kind of devices the company may launch, but local media in Taiwan speculate that Acer is planning an ultra-low cost laptop PC to compete against&#160;Asustek Computer&#39;s Eee PC laptop.Asustek created the Eee PC to sell in emerging markets such as China and India. It carries an Intel Celeron processor, weighs less than a kilogram, has a 7-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) and can connect to the Internet wirelessly. The lowest-priced version costs NT$7,999 (US$248).The Eee PC has garnered so much attention for Asustek, which forecast it will sell 3.8 million of the devices this year, that many of its fellow Taiwanese&#160;competitors are developing rival devices. Taiwan&#39;s Micro-Star International&#160;(MSI) has said it&#39;s working on an ultra-low cost notebook&#160;that will use an extremely low voltage, low-cost microprocessor from Intel called Diamondville. Intel has said it will formally unveil the new chip at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai this April.Acer also believes its&#160;first quarter sales will be far better than last year, despite global economic worries. Wang told local media that Acer&#39;s sales will rise 15 percent to 20 percent year-on-year in the first quarter, which ends March 31.&#160;
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Qualcomm , the world's top mobile chip designer, said on Wednesday China recently passed Japan to become its second largest Asian market, as it unveiled a major tie-up with leading smartphone maker HTC .