ALSO has mooted further M&A as it extended the pattern of barnstorming results among the world’s largest distributors.
Europe’s largest homegrown distributor – which recently gobbled UK peer Westcoast – saw revenues hike 21% to €8.3bn in the first six months of 2026.
It chalked this up to “growing demand for computing capacity, increasing data volumes and the expanding use of AI, which are raising demand for high-performance technologies”.
Net profits followed suit, bouncing 61% to €69m.
The Switzerland-based broadliner also flagged a 13% uptick in its return on capital employed (ROCE), which it said would help fund future growth.
Having completed its acquisition of Westcoast last February, ALSO has opted to retain the brand of its UK peer, which ranked second in Oxygen Must-Know Distributors and Marketplaces 2025.
This May, it moved to bolster its Italian presence by snapping up the assets and liabilities of the IT business of Datamatic.
“The integration of the new companies in the UK, Ireland, France and Italy remains on track and is generating additional value,” ALSO said.
“Further acquisitions are also under review.”
“Distribution doing pretty well at the moment”
For comparison, the world’s largest distie, TD Synnex, saw its gross billings power up 33.4% to $28.9bn in its latest quarter – although its results were bolstered by its fast-growing hyperscaler supply arm Hyve.
Its slightly smaller US-based peer, Ingram Micro, is also going great guns, generating a 13.7% hike in net sales to $13.96bn in its latest three-month period.
Talking at an Omdia event on Friday, Omdia Chief Analyst Alastair Edwards said distribution “is doing pretty well at the moment”.
“Distribution is going to play a central role in enabling partners and helping ensure there’s enough financial strength in the channel,” he said.
Although the likes of TD Synnex and Ingram have benefited from the latest craze of vendors including HPE throwing their weight behind just two or three global distributors, the trend could turn out to be “cyclical”, Edwards asserted, however.
“It puts more and more power into the hands of those companies to really define the rules of engagement, which is not always a good thing for vendors or for partners,” he said.
“It also leaves some of those specialists who are bringing a lot of skills into the channel out in the cold, and many of those specialists are still playing an important role.
“We think this will probably go through another cycle at some point, where the specialists and the smaller players start to see a resurgence.”
Westcoast has increased its stockholding by 25% to £425m in response to the ongoing memory shortages, MD Sunil Madhani told us in June.
ALSO picked up on this theme in its H1 statement, saying visibility for its second half “remains limited due to geopolitical developments and uncertainty surrounding demand, pricing and investment trends”.
For that reason, ALSO doubled down on its previous guidance of €300m-€340m and ROCE above 20% for the full year.
