Ingram Micro is still in transition to services and higher margin business as it reports Q2. This helped the distributor in Europe in particular. Europe revenues of $2.9bn was down 16% year-over-year in dollars, but up 2% in local currency. The region benefited from strong revenue contribution from mobility services and distribution, driven by robust iPhone demand and the addition of ANOVO, which added two percentage points of growth, it says.
Growth in advanced and specialty solutions was more than double the region's average, with particular strength in networking, storage, unified communications and virtualisation, says Ingram Micro. This growth helped offset lower sales into retail and consumer markets where there was significant buying last year in Q4 ahead of anticipated vendor price increases related to the weakening euro and for which the whole industry is still working through high inventory levels.
It says it, as a whole, experienced a healthy jump in gross margin due to newly acquired services businesses and solid improvement broadly in the base business; operating cash flows were nearly $570m.
Total revenue for the second quarter was $10.6 billion, down 3% in dollars as the translation of foreign currencies versus last year had an eight percentage point negative impact. Recent acquisitions contributed two percentage points of the growth. Gross margin was 6.22%, a 41 basis point improvement over last year. Q2 gross margin benefited by about 30 basis points from the addition of ANOVO's mobility services business. Additionally, all regions benefited from a better mix of additional solutions sales with broadly distributed strength in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, it says.
Alain Monié- Chief Executive Officer: “Our engineering efforts are oriented towards three areas: rapidly onboarding ISVs and partner's cloud offerings onto our platform, creating specific integrated vertical solutions such as in healthcare or small retail, and enrolling our customers onto our marketplace as rapidly as possible to enable them to offer these solutions to their customers immediately.”