CDW’s UK arm grew by “high single digits” in Q1, it said as it revealed it is targeting up to $200m in annual savings from its new “AI-powered modernisation initiative”.
The world’s largest reseller saw net sales leap 9.2% year on year to $5.68bn in a set of Q1 results CEO Christine Leahy said amounted to a “strong start to the year”.
Its UK arm, which ranked fourth in Oxygen 250 2026, saw net sales power up by “high single digits”.
Combined, the UK and Canada contributed $802.5m to the Nasdaq-listed giant’s quarterly total.
Despite this, CDW’s shares dropped by around a fifth amid investor jitters about how sales of AI hardware are impacting its margins.
On the earnings call, Leahy said she expected CDW’s internal “AI-powered modernisation initiative”, Geared for Growth, to begin bearing fruit in the back end of the year, meanwhile.
It comprises AI-driven enhancements across how CDW sells and operates, including coworker AI fluency, deeper data integration, and platform readiness, and productivity gains from tools such as agentic RFP capabilities, she explained.
CDW is using it to target annual runrate improvements of between $100m and $200m, CFO Al Miralles added.
Procuring product? Pas de probleme
Despite dire predictions about how the deepening memory shortage could play out in the channel, Miralles said CDW is “not feeling concern around being able to get product”.
“We would expect that the second half of the year looks much more normalised as things play out,” he said on the call – a transcript of which can be found here.
The push to deploy AI at scale has “driven demand for accelerating compute past available supply”, Leahy conceded, however.
To address this constraint, CDW has finalised a relationship with provider Boost Run to deliver its customers access to high-performance AI infrastructure through a flexible GPU-as-a-service model, she explained.
Despite the upbeat comments, CDW’s shares fell sharply on the results, contrasting with the all-time trading highs being racked up by UK peer Computacenter.
CDW’s market value stands at $13.95bn at the time of writing – less than half that of most of the first half of 2024. Computacenter recently broke through £4bn – paradoxically on the back of its burgeoning US success.
Looking ahead, CDW expects to outperform the low single-digit growth slated for its US IT addressable market by 200 to 300 basis points this year, Leahy said.
