Channel News
TD Synnex CEO: Advanced Solutions Business Up, PCs Still In Decline
Joseph F. Kovar
‘The offerings that are related to digital transformation—cloud, analytics, IoT, cybersecurity, hyperscale infrastructures—our high-growth areas continue to materially, as an industry, outpace the market. So for Advanced Solutions, it’s a combination of those high-growth technologies that fit within that category, with cloud, analytics, IoT, cybersecurity being really quite robust, along with the fact that there was some pent-up backlog that’s being fulfilled,’ says TD Synnex CEO Rich Hume.
Looking To Move Past The PC Drag
TD Synnex’s first fiscal quarter 2023, which ended Feb. 28, was a mixed bag for the world’s largest IT distributor. The company, with dual headquarters in Fremont, Calif., and Clearwater, Fla., Tuesday reported revenue of $15.1 billion, which was down 2 percent year over year, although that number was up 1 percent in constant currency.
At the same time, TD Synnex, formed in September 2021 from the merger of Tech Data and Synnex, provided second fiscal quarter 2023 revenue guidance of between $14.0 billion and $15.0 billion, which is down from the actual second fiscal quarter 2022 revenue of $15.5 billion.
TD Synnex CEO Rich Hume told CRN in an exclusive meeting that while sales of the company’s Advanced Solutions business—which consists in large part of data center infrastructure technologies—rose over last year and are expected to continue to do so in the current quarter, the company’s endpoint business—which includes PCs—suffered in large part from the success the PC business had early in the COVID pandemic.
[Related: TD Synnex CEO: We’re Bringing ‘Sales Engagement Or Energy To Where There Is Demand’]
“The PC category started to see a reasonably steep decline the last half of last year, and it’s continued,” Hume said. “So the compare gets easier. Year on year, we’re still in the period of more tough comparison, that is, our Q1. And there was a point of view that the channel in totality had to work down inventory. Those higher COVID levels of inventory have been worked down across the supply chain.”
Hume, in his discussion with CRN, spent time to go behind the numbers to look at what is happening with TD Synnex and what to expect for the rest of fiscal and calendar 2023. Here is what he had to say.
