Ingram Micro today confirmed a worst-kept secret by officially filing plans for an IPO.
The distributor intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “INGM”, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and J.P. Morgan acting as joint book-running managers for the proposed offering.
Here IT Channel Oxygen rounds up five key talking points from the news.
1. It’s no shock
With Bloomberg reporting that Ingram was looking to launch an $8bn IPO back in March, the distributor’s publication of a formal go-public plan comes as no shock.
An IPO would see the California-based broadliner return to public ownership following an eight-year spell in private hands.
Ingram was acquired for $7.2bn in July 2021 by Platinum Equity, ending a five-year ownership stint by China-based HNA Group (which acquired it for $6bn in 2016).
2. Ingram is definitely smaller than TD Synnex (or is it?)
TD Synnex overtook Ingram to become the world’s largest IT distributor by sales when it formed via the merger of Tech Data and Synnex in 2021.
But given the secrecy shrouding Ingram’s numbers, it’s been hard to track the size of the gap… until now.
Just like TD Synnex, Ingram’s top line has inevitably shrunk back since the height of the pandemic, when demand for client devices and remote working kit went through the roof.
Ingram’s net sales hit $48bn in calendar 2023, down from $50.8bn in 2022 and $54.5bn in 2021, its form S-1 showed (TD Synnex saw revenues fall from $62.3bn to $57.6bn in its fiscal 2023, while its net sales shrank from $80.6bn to $77.2bn).
Interestingly, Ingram does have a marginally higher headcount than its arch nemesis (employing 24,150 staff, to TD Synnex’s circa 23,000).
3. But it’s claiming an Xvantage advantage
Ingram held up Xvantage as one of five “key benefits” of its business model.
It billed the “self-learning” platform as a “significant milestone” in its evolution, name-checking it a whopping 22 times in its IPO filing.
Building on its CloudBlue cloud marketplace, Xvantage has already been launched in 14 countries, including Ingram’s native US and the UK.
Many tasks that previously took hours or even days, such as order status updates, price quotes and vendor catalogue management activities, can now be accomplished by the platform in a few minutes, Ingram boasted.
“Based on our experience in the industry, we believe the strength of our Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace and CloudBlue platform allows us to capture cloud opportunities that may not be available to our competitors,” Ingram added of its wider cloud business.
4. Ingram’s revenue declines are stabilising
Despite the overall top-line fall in 2023, Ingram’s Advanced Solutions business actually grew last year, with net sales advancing from $17.4bn to $17.9bn, its form S-1 revealed.
With the PC market stabilising in 2024 (and arch-rival TD Synnex recently returning to growth), it’s no surprise that Ingram’s net sales for the first six months of this year fell much less dramatically than in 2023, dipping only slightly from $23.1bn to $22.9bn year on year.
5. Ingram is full of facts
Ingram’s form S-1 will be a godsend for anyone picked to go on Mastermind with the distributor as their specialist subject.
To reel off but a few fun facts, Ingram said it has 1,500 vendor partners and serves 161,000 VAR, SI, telco and MSP customers.
It claims to manage over 850 million units of technology products across more than 220,000 unique SKUs annually, and over 52 million seats through CloudBlue.
Ingram listed AMD, Apple, Cisco, Dell Technologies, HPE, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Super Micro Computer among its key hardware vendors and Adobe, AWS, Cisco, Microsoft, Proofpoint and VMware among its cloud allies.
It expects to use the proceeds of the IPO to pay down a portion of its Term Loan Credit Facility.
“In the face of significant economic uncertainty and volatility in commercial markets globally, we believe that our business remains well-positioned to benefit from technology megatrends, including cloud migration, enhanced security, Internet-of-Things, hybrid work and 5G,” Ingram concluded.
