Avnet Eats The Rest Of Magirus

July 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The big keep on getting bigger, and now master reseller Avnet has ponied up an undisclosed sum to acquire Magirus Group, an IT distributor based in Stuttgart, Germany.

Magirus has operations across Western Europe and is in every country except Ireland, Finland, and Norway; the company also has operations in the Middle East, centered in Dubai. The company was founded in 1981 and back in October 2007 when Avnet acquired the IBM and Hewlett-Packard systems distribution business from Magirus, the company had sales in the range of €700 million (about $996 million) and had over 600 employees; the IBM and HP distie bizzes accounted for around $500 million of that and about 140 employees at the time, with about 1,300 downstream value-added distributors.

Avnet bought a very big chunk of the company in terms of revenues, and then Magirus decided to focus on selling servers from Dell and eventually Cisco Systems, storage from EMC and Isilon Systems, virtualization tools from VMware and Veeam, and hosted and cloudy capacity from Colt , which operates 19 data centers around Europe. The company has 400 employees as Avnet takes the second and final bite of Magirus, and had managed to grow sales of $530 million in calendar 2011, according to Avnet. The company had over 4,500 downstream reseller, system integration, and IT service provider partners.

The deal will particularly bolster Avnet’s position in France and Germany, and will be immediately helpful to the Avnet bottom line. Pending regulatory approvals, Avent expects to close the deal in October of this year. By which time it will probably be hungry again. Magirus will be rolled into the EMEA portion of the Technology Solutions half of Avnet, of course.