Avnet swoops on Magirus

European distribution mega-merger

Avnet has shaken up the pan-European distribution market by announcing it has agreed to acquire datacentre specialist Magirus.

Magirus is one of Europe's last remaining regional VADs with revenue last year of $530m (£338m) and vendor contracts with Cisco, VMware and EMC.

Founded in 1981, the Germany-based firm has 400 staff and a database of 4,500 resellers. Its services span demand generation, pre-sales, consultancy, training, certification and implementation as well as support from its pan-European, multi-lingual support centre.

According to our archives, the UK has historically contributed close to 20 per cent of sales.

Rumours that privately held Magirus was up for sale have been swirling for a while and Avnet was perhaps a natural candidate, having bought Magirus' IBM and HP server and storage business in 2007.

Graeme Watt (pictured), president of Avnet Technology Solutions EMEA, said: "Magirus is a high-quality, focused business and represents an excellent expansion to our current operations as it adds complementary product lines across the region while meaningfully increasing our scale in important markets including Germany and France."

Avnet, which has made a number of sizeable acquisitions over the past few years - most notably Bell Micro - said it expects to close the transaction in October 2012. Magirus will be integrated into Avnet Technology Solutions' EMEA business, Avnet added.

The move comes just days after Avnet announced plans to cut costs in its UK business through a restructure.