Karma offloads Syquest disk drives

Storage Distributor dumps Syquest despite a pan-European deal.

Troubled removable disk drive vendor Syquest has been dealt a severe blow as one of its major UK distributors announced that it intends to drop the supplier and push its rival Iomega.

CHS' storage distribution arm, Karma International, said it will be dropping the US-based supplier because its products do not fit in with Karma's UK model.

According to Ron Golan, Karma UK general manager, Syquest products were taken on when the vendor appointed the distributor in a pan-European contract in June. But the distributor claimed that the Syquest drives do not sell well as volume products.

'We signed the deal over four months ago, but it does not suit us. We can not give the product the level of focus we would like,' said Golan.

'The time it takes to sell a single Syquest drive can easily be used to sell a whole box of other drives,' he added.

Commenting on the decision to focus on Iomega drives, he said: 'Iomega wants to establish the Zip drive as the new floppy drive in a potential market of 60 million PCs. It is getting ready to drop its prices considerably and we are ready to get behind it.'

A representative for Syquest responded that although the UK deal may be over, the pan-European agreement remained intact. 'And besides, we still have big name distributors like Ideal Hardware and Ingram Micro with us,' he said.

In another development, Golan said Karma was looking at the possibility of entering the consumables market, where it hoped to harness the relationship between holding company CHS Electronics and the likes of Hewlett Packard and Canon. He claimed CHS was HP's biggest consumable customer.

He also mentioned the possibility that Karma would build a UK retail channel to challenge the likes of PC World. 'The retailers have outrageously high margins in retail,' he remarked. 'And the prices they charge are so much higher than in the US.'