Global reseller duo yet to feel Brexit pinch

Insight says it has seen 'no indications of any real pause', while Systemax says it has yet to see any 'significant' direct impact'

Two of the world's largest resellers, Insight Enterprises and Systemax, have yet to see a direct impact of Brexit on their business, according to their respective CEOs.

The US-headquartered firms played down the impact June's referendum has had on their local business as they talked through their latest quarterly results this week.

Insight's CEO Ken Lamneck said he had seen "no indications of any real pause", while his opposite number at Systemax, Larry Reinhold, said he had yet to see any "significant direct impact".

Analysts rushed to downgrade their UK IT spending forecasts in the wake of Brexit and since then the top-four global PC manufacturers - Lenovo, HP, Dell and Asus - have announced UK price hikes in the region of 10 per cent.

But when asked about Brexit, Lamneck said it was "really early to tell", adding that the confidence levels may have been helped by the UK "addressing the government very quickly".

"But we'll start to see it play out into the areas we'll watch most. First will be the public sector, as you'd expect that to be the most impacted - if there is an impact - and that typically happens in the first quarter of the calendar year, that's the biggest quarter."

Reinhold, meanwhile, said: "While Brexit has received significant headlines, we have not seen any significant direct impact on our business yet. We booked a number of recent enterprise-level account wins, and the strengthening of our sales organisation remains an area of focus."

Jonathan Wagstaff, UK country manager at analyst Context, agreed that it was too early to predict the mid- to long-term impact of Brexit but said PC sales actually spiked dramatically in the aftermath of the vote as resellers scrambled to get their hands on stock ahead of price rises.

"In week 26 and 27 we saw a huge spike in sales of notebooks and desktops. Resellers wanted to hoover up as much stock at the lower prices as possible," he said.