The world’s largest dealer of refurbished Cisco kit is poised to launch a UK office, just as rival Network Liquidators prepares to remove its local presence.
US-based giant Network Hardware Resale (NHR), which employs 50 staff at its European hub in Amsterdam, is planning to open an outpost in central London by February.
Hans van Solt, recently appointed vice president of EMEA sales at NHR, said the strategy would enable it to build closer ties with UK clients.
“We’re starting to provide more services such as architecture design and asset recovery, so we also need an office to support that,” he said.
NHR, which boasts a global turnover of $170m, hopes that the move will allow it to thrust UK revenue from $10m to $25m between 2007 and 2010. It currently has six staff serving the UK from Amsterdam.
“We have $100m of stock in our warehouses in Santa Barbara and Amsterdam and can offer next-day delivery 95 per cent of the time,” van Solt said. “We also offer up to 95 per cent discounts on Cisco prices and one-year warranties.”
However, the move comes as rival refurbished equipment dealer Network Liquidators prepares to close its UK office, citing customer indifference for local support as the reason.
Joe Serra, executive vice-president at the Florida-based firm, which only launched its UK office in October, said: “We looked at service levels and talked to our UK customers. The feedback we got was that they were indifferent to where our physical sales office is located.”
Serra confirmed Network Liquidators’ three UK staff had already been made redundant, although he said it would continue to serve the UK and Europe from the US.
Garath Lauder, managing director of Juniper VAR Data Integration, was unfazed by the shifting second-user dealer landscape. “The system design work we do for blue-chip companies is not in competition with the second-hand user market,” he said.
Rob Haddrell, managing director at second-hand dealer Tin Direct, said: “We’d welcome the fact that NHR thinks there is a market for it in the UK because we already do a fair amount of business with it.”
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