Synnex wins lucrative contract

In July, HP Australia's imaging and printing group (IPG) invited around eight organisations to bid for the gaping hole left in its consumables business by the removal of Daisytek from its distribution books.

From September 1, Synnex will start moving HP printer consumable products in a deal that could potentially be worth $100 million per annum.

“The reason that we won the business is because Synnex has an excellent, responsive supply chain and that's key to be successful in the supply business,” said Frank Sheu, managing director at Synnex Australia.

Synnex was first appointed as a HP printer distributor in October last year, when HP Australia announced its post Compaq merger channel structure. Up until now only Tech Pacific, Digiland and Dynamic Supplies were moving HP consumables.

“This is consumable business previously not given to us. Now that Daisytek is gone, we are moving to cover some of Daisytek's market plus the traditional IT channel as well,” Sheu said.

He claimed that HP consumables distribution is “big business”, covering not only the traditional IT markets, but also newsagents, Kmart, Officeworks and stationary suppliers.

“The order size will be small, but we're expecting to see a huge number of orders put through which is OK with our business model,” Sheu said.

The company didn't reject any small-sized orders, he said, adding that the distributor's back-end systems would be able to cope with an increased order count. Today, the distributor processes 35,000 orders per month. The addition of HP consumables distribution would potentially add another 10,000 orders per month to its workload.

“We've centralised a lot of functions in Melbourne head office, but we have decentralised a lot of functions in state offices. Every state office (Sydney, Brisbane and Perth) are all fully functional [separate] units.

“They've got credit, BDM, sales and warehouse people, [their] own trucks and repair staff. So each branch is more like a state-based distributor – so that is the advantage we have,” he said.

When contacted by CRN at press time, Rebekah O'Flaherty, general manager at HP's IPG, declined to comment further on Synnex's appointment. Early last month, O'Flaherty said HP was looking for a distributor that could service the large format retail channel.

Daisytek went into liquidation on July 7 and lost HP consumables distribution in June. Ingram Micro was also pitching for the HP consumables business.