01732 759725
DISTRIBUTION
20
Nigel Morris,
Marketing
Director
Chris Moore,
Head of Sales –
Beta Northern
Office
Miguel Castro,
Head of Solutions
Architecture
Turnover for FY16/17 was £200
million, representing around eight
per cent growth on the previous year.
“Growth has come from all parts of
the business, but we’ve witnessed
a significant increase within our
technology products offer,” Nigel
Morris, Beta’s Marketing Director
explained.
Beta’s technology products business
spans transactional items such as LTO
tapes – products which resellers can source
from stock at a competitive price and
which are delivered next-day, to pro-sumer
products such as desktop drives, through to
enterprise high-end technology solutions,
typically sourced by VARs and MSPs.
Around 2,600 customers traded with
Beta last year, a number that Morris says
has been similar for the past couple of
years but will probably increase this year
as the product offering broadens to attract
more VARs and MSPs. The distie, which has
103 staff, processes around 2,000 orders
per day.
“We have consistently grown the
business year on year and we are targeting
an incremental ten per cent this coming
year,” Morris said. “In a very competitive
market where some of the core products
are in decline, this may seem quite a
challenge. But we’re confident we have a
strong plan in place to achieve our goal.”
Building its proposition
Beta is focused on further building its
proposition in the enterprise technology
arena. It has made two key appointments
and opened a new Northern office, moves
designed to support its strategy to ramp up
its presence within this space.
The distie has recently recruited Chris
Moore as Head of Sales for its newly
opened Northern office, which is in Leeds.
Moore, who was formerly Sales Manager
at CMS Distribution, where he spent 19
years sees enormous opportunity at Beta.
Commenting on his appointment he said:
“I was really impressed with the ambition
and ongoing investment plans that Beta
has to become a leading player in the
enterprise market. A really strong product
and brand portfolio plus a very clear vision
of how to succeed in this market were two
of the main factors in deciding to become
part of this very exciting journey.”
“In Chris, we’ve hired a heavy hitter –
CMS was effectively our biggest competitor
in this sector, so that’s a really big step for
us,” Morris said, adding that he is currently
recruiting experienced enterprise sales
people to add to the team.
Morris said that the decision to expand
its footprint into the north of the country
was a tactical one. “People buy from
people, and we’ve opened the new office
in the centre of Leeds to increase the
support we offer to our Northern-based
partners.”
Miguel Castro has also joined as Head
of Solutions Architecture. In this newly
created role, Castro will provide in-depth
technical and implementation support to
MSPs and VARs, working with them from
project inception right through to final
delivery.
Castro has been in the IT industry
for over 13 years, with his most recent
role at network storage solutions vendor
Infortrend, an important vendor for Beta.
Easy to do business with
Morris pointed out that whilst Beta’s focus
is firmly on growth within the enterprise
space, sales of consumables, its bread and
butter, have also risen. “EOS is a declining
market but we continue to get a bigger
chunk each year. I think our big USPs are
that we are a wholly trade-only business,
Beta Distribution has achieved
another year of growth,
recording a £15 million increase
in turnover year on year
Beta opens
two new offices
we have a large stock holding, offer great
pricing and we can direct ship to end-users
next-day,” he said.
The print business also continues to
remain strong. “We are Canon’s largest
print hardware distributor and it’s very
much business as usual with the Samsung
print range we offer,” Morris said.
Next month Beta will launch a new
range of select consumer-type products
such as desktop drives that Morris says can
be sold in much the same way as resellers
sell other volume-based commodity
products including printers, scanners and
EOS.
“With GDPR imminent, we see an
opportunity for dealers to sell a wider
range of products and they don’t need a
great deal of technical knowledge to make
margin,” he stated.
The company’s digital signage arm is
also going from strength to strength. It has
just agreed a partnership with Samsung
to deliver its large format displays (LFDs)
range with additional services that include
in-house content creation, delivery and
management.
The partnership will enable BetaDMS
channel partners to offer a full digital
signage service to customers expanding
portfolios further than just hardware
and generating additional revenue. “The
Samsung brand is a great one to have in
our portfolio and a name that will attract
the attention of potential customers for
our IT resellers. The company has also
opened a new sales office in Reading to
further enable growth within the AV and
IT sectors.
