Italian distributor Esprinet is buying the distribution activities of rival EDSlan, founded in 1988 with its eight branch offices, 94 employees and about twenty agents and consultants. The business is considered a strong player in the networking market segment, with cabling, VoIP and unified communications & Collaboration.
Among its main are include Hewlett Packard Enterprise Networking, Aruba Networks, Huawei Enterprise, Brocade Networks, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Watchguard, Allied Telesis Panduit, CommScope, AudioCodes and Panasonic.
The business unit involved in the transaction had around 2900 clients in 2015 over 2,900 clients including system integrators, comms resellers, as well as installers, a type of customer historically not served by the Esprinet Group. According to preliminary figures in 2015 the assets acquired have developed a turnover of around €72.1m, with EBITDA of about €2.2m.
The equity value of the transaction amounted to €6.44m, it says and on closing Esprinet will take all of borrowings related to the business unit with the exception of a mortgage loan. The transaction allows the Esprinet Group to accelerate its strategy for the more complex technology market, which it launched in 2011 with the creation of the separate organisation V-Valley, which is designed to meet and in some cases anticipate the needs of this market for data centre business. In this perspective the acquisition of EDSlan represents a further step in the development of the focused strategy for Esprinet, allowing it to strengthen areas such as networking and UC, and enter new "analogue" markets such as cabling, telephony, video conferencing systems and measuring instruments.
After this purchase the Esprinet Group will claim to cover the segment of complex technologies with a commercial structure of more than 150 people, with a pro-forma sales of about €300m and it says it has the ambition to aim to establish itself as the top distributor here after winning the top slot for business and consumer electronics.