Ten years ago it seemed like a radical idea: a distributor’s own brand. A house brand. Sure, in those days you had a few odd distributors like Trust that lived by building their brand, but in general the Brand (with a Capital “B”) was still territory occupied solely by Tier 1 vendors who could buy expertise from marketing gurus and big agencies.

Vendors built brands, distributors built channels and route-to-market for those brands, and retailers built traffic and sales. It was a far more, simple world (although we still managed to get confused in it).

Scribona, Scandinavia’s broadliner distributor with revenues of 873 million Euro, grows tired of cost-cutting, krona-pinching and closing offices ...and sells out to pan-European rival Tech Data.

Scribona had 14,456,937 reasons to sell out as that matches their latest losses in Euro on their 2007 Annual Report. (Based on today’s currency exchange.)

Tech Data, driving a good bargain, will pay only the net asset value for inventory, some intellectual property, material contracts, office Continue reading...

After SMG relinquished pan-Scandic business by selling their Swedish and Norwegian subsidiaries to GNT group, Danish distributor SMG discovered the hard way that they had become “too small.”

Several vendors (Intel, AMD and Maxtor, among others) ended their partnership with SMG after the sale in September 2006. MD Ole Mortensen and Chairman Mark Keough still hope for new investors.

SMG’s Web Site Shows No Sign Yet