Bob Huang

Published for the Week Of December 13, 2004

In the summer of 1949, a four-year-old boy walked down a dirt road, a heavy sack tossed over his shoulder as his bare feet kicked up a dust trail behind him.

He was a familiar sight to villagers in Taichung, Taiwan, who smiled as the boy passed, struggling under the weight of the bag full of Dragon’s Eyes, a brown-shelled fruit native to this part of the country and plucked from his parents’ backyard. The resourceful preschooler would bag all the fruit he could reach and trek to the local temple, where parched worshippers would buy it for a few coins. Even then, Bob Huang was a crafty businessman.

Fifty-five years later, no one has figured out how to stop Huang, who has been president and CEO of Synnex for the past 24 years. He has built the distributor into a $4 billion company and crafted a unique model no one in the channel is likely to replicate. Over time, Synnex has established itself as a solid broadline distributor, ranking No. 3 behind Ingram Micro and Tech Data. Synnex’s contract manufacturing business—something its competitors don’t have—is flourishing again. A state-of-the-art integration center at its new Fremont, Calif., headquarters allowed Synnex to begin manufacturing its own line of peripherals earlier this year as well as help solution provider California Digital build the world’s second-largest supercomputer.

Oh, by the way, Synnex also managed a successful initial public offering last fall.

For years, Huang, a former international sales manager at Advanced Micro Devices, kept Synnex under the radar of its larger competitors, even as it made several key acquisitions that strengthened its line card beyond its roots in components and hard drives and increased its customer base. Huang has proven himself a brilliant tactician along the way. Analysts note that Synnex’s customer and vendor additions are mostly accretive, and the integrations run smoothly.

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Huang feels his success comes from minding the details. Two distinct examples are Synnex’s regional warehouse approach and its smaller product portfolio, which provides the distributor with cheaper shipping and sales training costs, respectively.

Kirk Lundblade, managing director at Bear Stearns, the lead underwriter for Synnex’s IPO, got a firsthand look at one of the warehouses last year during Synnex’s road show for investors—and he also got a taste of Huang’s seemingly boundless energy. Most companies try to give between eight and 10 presentations a day to investors during an IPO road show. Huang wanted to do more. “Most guys are exhausted, but one day in Boston, Bob was like, ‘Why can’t we do 11’? The guy is never short of energy,” Lundblade says.

“People forget he’s been kicking around the business for as long as anybody. He’s very detail-oriented and one of the most experienced and successful veterans in the industry,” says Steve Raymund, chairman and CEO of Tech Data, Clearwater, Fla. “He’s an interesting guy in that he embodies what [you need] as a key factor for success in IT—adaptability. He comes from another country. He started the business as a components distributor, got into contract manufacturing and, in the last few years, migrated into a branded product distributor. He’s seen a lot of success in all of it.”

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Synnex often gets characterized as a box-pushing engine that offers cutthroat pricing, but the company’s real value stems from its willingness to get entrenched with its customers, says Dan DeVries, executive vice president of sales and marketing at PC Mall, a Torrance, Calif.-based solution provider.

“When you deal with Bob and you’re talking about your business, he always drills down to very specific topics. Bob drives down to the nuts and bolts to find something that he can help you with,” DeVries says. “Frankly, the industry needed more than two [broadline distributors]. He’s made Synnex into a viable and valuable distributor. And what’s most impressive is that he’s done it under the radar.”

Huang seems to relish his role as a quiet, behind-the-scenes leader. At the 2004 Industry Hall of Fame ceremony at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., last month, he spent little time detailing his own accomplishments and instead singled out more than a dozen other Synnex executives one-by-one in a heartfelt acceptance speech. Huang said they were the real reason behind his success.

Executive Vice President Peter Larocque, Huang’s longtime right-hand man and one of the people Huang lauded during his acceptance speech, vehemently disagrees. “Bob Huang is Synnex. It’s that simple,” he says. “He sets a great example. He’s our risk taker. He’s the smartest guy in the company. He’s the hardest-working guy in the company. That’s a hard combination to be, but he really loves what he does. You can’t be all those things if you don’t like what you’re doing.”

Huang’s contributions to the channel are incalculable, Larocque says. He has spent countless hours trying to convince vendors that the channel is the best go-to-market strategy for their products and services. He rarely criticizes vendors publicly when they make overtures about moving more business direct. Instead, he focuses on what more he can do to win back business.

“Bob says it’s too easy to complain. His first question was, ‘What do we need to do to help you?’ Instead of preaching to them, he asks what more we can do,” Larocque says.

About the only time Huang gets angry, according to his wife Lilly, is when he’s stuck in traffic. “He loses patience because he feels that he’s wasting his time,” she says. “He’s always chasing the time. There’s too much to do. He has too many ideas.”

Many of Huang’s ideas involve finding ways to improve the channel. For example, Synnex refused to take part in channel stuffing on behalf of manufacturers when that was a more prevalent issue several years ago, Larocque says. “He simply felt it was just not the right way to do business,” he says. “It’s the same reason why we don’t buy from the gray market when vendors ask us not to buy from third parties. One hundred percent of our products comes from the vendor. [Huang’s] very principled, and that makes it simple for us to do our job, too. I work 2,500 miles away from him, but I know what he wants because it’s very simple.”

Huang turns 60 next year and jokes that he would be happy to play more golf than just his weekly Sunday afternoon round at Castlewood Country Club in Pleasanton, Calif., where his family has a house. But he also says there’s more work to be done.

“We will continue to work for our suppliers and our customers, asking what other things we can do for them. We don’t have the strategy to be so much in terms of revenue or market share. I think it will come as long as we provide a valuable service that we can make money on,” Huang says.

Even if it’s not at the same margins as the “free” fruit of his youth.