Midwich looks to grow interactive arm to £20m

Midwich targeting increased interactive revenue after partnering with SMART earlier this year

Midwich is looking to grow its interactive business to £20m after adding SMART to its vendor portfolio.

Speaking to CRN at Midwich's TechExposed event, Midwich sales director Iain Campbell explained that the addition of SMART will allow Midwich to almost triple the size of its interactive arm, which currently stands at around £7m.

"It's made quite a big impact on our business," he said. "We had a £7m interactive business with ELO, Sharp, etc, and I suspect that by the end of a year we'll have probably a nearly £20m interactive business, so it's become a big part of our business now.

"We've always had decent market share in our large format display and projection business, and now we want the same in interactive."

Campbell didn't rule out the prospect of adding new vendors to the Midwich roster, but said any newcomers will have to fit in with the overall portfolio.

"We're not going to take a vendor on for the sake of taking a vendor on," he said.

"It's got to be complementary to us and it's got to be in agreement with our current vendors, especially if they cross over a bit."

Stuart Mizon, divisional director at Midwich, added that the distributor had "admired SMART from afar for a while", before stepping in to fill the gap left by previous distributor Steljes.

He said he expects demand in interactive products to continue to increase, driven by demand from school pupils.

"As that generation of people that have been using this technology in school start to enter the workplace we'll start seeing demand for it in the workplace," he said.

"Education is the start but the corporate side will follow as these people grow up and mature with the technology - they'll grow up expecting it.

"Resellers need to be talking to their education end users. Ultimately schools are competing for pupils so if one school has this technology and the others haven't they're giving themselves a competitive advantage, so schools need to be thinking about this."