Arrow sees revenue rise, but ECS stutters

Hardware continues to decline, but solutions sees growth

Arrow Electronics has reported a revenue increase for its first quarter, but its Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) arm saw sales decline.

For the three months ending 1 April 2017, the Arrow group saw revenue up 5.2 per cent to $5.76bn, but Arrow ECS saw a decline of 5.4 per cent to $1.7bn.

However on an earnings call, a transcript of which can be found on Seeking Alpha, Arrow CEO Michael Long took positives from the ECS performance, particularly growth in its software business.

"Our infrastructure software business posted strong growth led by security and analytics," he said.

"The rate of decline for our hardware products, most notably storage, improved meaningfully.

"I'm encouraged by the performance of both the Global Components and global Enterprise Computing Solutions business in the first quarter."

Expanding on the ECS performance, ECS president Sean Kerins said that its software solutions business saw year-on-year growth of three per cent, while next-generation hardware also saw some success.

"We saw the rate of hardware decline [slow] meaningfully in Q1 versus Q4, so we think that's a good trend. In fact, in storage we saw a modest growth in Europe in the first quarter," he said.

"Along with our software-based solutions growth, which we expect to continue this year, and continued progress with what I call next-gen hardware - not to mention some of the share shifts that we continue to identify and enjoy due to some of the competitive realignment in the marketplace - I feel good about the full year and I think we'll see more of that ramp across the second half."

During the last earnings call, Arrow declared it would snatch $350m from its competitors after surviving Dell's distribution review.

Kerins claimed that consolidation in the distribution space is creating uncertainty among resellers in the channel, which Arrow is capitalising on.

"Any time you see competitive realignment you're going to create some uncertainty in the channel, and so I think you have a lot of resellers and solution providers who are looking for a safe pair of hands in the value channel," he added.

"We clearly are staying in the value space, and so we're getting a lot of good looks and a lot of good calls, and I would say the run rate of net new customers and line card extensions with existing customers continues to improve."