ALSO has revealed it paid €553m for Westcoast, as it detailed the billion-euro-plus contribution the UK broadliner made to its first-half numbers.
Mainland Europe’s largest distributor closed its acquisition of Westcoast on 28 February 2025 in a move designed to bolster its presence in the UK, Ireland and France.
Westcoast’s closest homegrown peer, Exertis IT, also last week sold up to private equity house AURELIUS for an enterprise value of “around £100m”.
Westcoast weighs in
Despite only contributing four months to the sales ledger, Westcoast’s impact can clearly be seen in ALSO’s interim 2025 numbers.
The Swiss firm’s ultimate top line – namely ‘revenue’ – swelled 35% year on year to €6.87bn in the first six months of 2025.
Some €171m of that increase came from organic growth, with acquisitions contributing the remaining €1.59bn.
ALSO split out a lower ‘net sales’ figure (which excluded deals where it acted as ‘agent’ rather than ‘principle’).
This stood at €5.93bn, up from €4.28bn a year earlier.
Westcoast contributed €1.31bn to that net sales tally, ALSO said.
In the interim report, ALSO revealed that it paid a total consideration of €552.7m for the Theale-based distributor (it had previously stated that it paid around six times EBITDA).
That comprised €410.4m in cash and the transfer of 480,000 ALSO shares with a fair value of €142.3m.
Integration to take “several years“
Westcoast topped IT Channel Oxygen’s most-recent Top 50 Must-Know UK IT Distributors.
As well as being the UK’s largest distributor by revenue, Westcoast’s French operation will swell ALSO’s local sales by 40%, it claimed.
The integration of Westcoast will take place “over several years”, with individual topics “being prioritised based on profitability potential”, ALSO said in March. Westcoast Chairman and Owner Joe Hemani has become a “major” shareholder in ALSO.
ALSO’s revenue increase was matched at the bottom line, with reported EBITDA vaulting 34% to £126m.
Its cloud platform made a “significant contribution”, with unique users rising 34% to 5.5 million and revenue reaching €845m.
“We thank our resellers, vendors, suppliers, shareholders, and especially our employees for their support,” ALSO CEO Wolfgang Krainz stated.
