Top VARs 2019: Product pushers

Feverish demand for digital transformation is driving a rebound in product sales for the channel, with traditional resale rather than services currently the engine room of growth for the UK's largest VARs.

Softcat, Computacenter, CDW, Insight and SCC packed a collective £808m onto their product sales in their latest years. They shifted £4.24bn-worth of product between them - a 24 per cent annual hike.

In contrast, this quintet's collective services haul rose only fractionally, from £636m to £641m, with two of the five - Computacenter and Insight - registering significant drops.

Having spent recent years building services revenues, SCC said it deliberately increased the breadth of its supply business in its fiscal 2019 to mitigate any potential impact from economic uncertainty. Turnover from its supply business consequently hit nearly £500m, the highest level for five years.

"Having completed the exercise to remove low-margin turnover from the business, we are looking forward to growth in the future with acceptable levels of margin," SCC said.

A 33 per cent uplift in product sales at Softcat was enough for the Marlow-based reseller to oust larger rival Computacenter as the UK's largest shifter of third-party hardware and software. Computacenter's services business remains nearly £300m larger, however.