Arrow ECS is enduring “growing pains” from its new sole-supplier vendor pacts, the CFO of its parent company acknowledged despite predicting they will boost profits longer term.
Arrow Electronics yesterday announced a 13% year-on-year rise in sales to $7.71bn for its Q3 ended 27 September 2025, with its ECS arm seeing sales hike 15% to $2.16bn.
Despite this, ECS was hit with $21m of charges during the quarter relating to “multi-year contracts that have underperformed”.
“New motion”
On the earnings call, Arrow’s exec made it clear that these contracts relate to a “new motion” that sees the distributor becoming the “sole operator” for a given vendor.
Although it did not name the “multiple large suppliers” this applies to, in January Arrow announced it was moving to a sole-supplier relationship with Citrix for EMEA and North America.
Under these “strategic outsourcing agreements”, Arrow acts on behalf of the vendor for a given perimeter and becomes the brand”, ECS President Eric Nowak clarified on the earnings call, a transcript of which can be found here.
“We take control of the go-to-market activities,” Nowak explained.
“This new motion provides us exclusivity, cross-selling opportunities, better margin, and stickier relationships as we become the sole operator in the market, including for the white space of the supplier and sometimes also in other parts of the world.”
“We’re really excited about it”
On the call, Arrow CFO Raj Agrawal clarified that the $21m of charges related to “under-absorption of fixed fee payments that we’re supposed to be making” on these contracts.
Despite this, the distributor is “really excited” about the impact such pacts could have on its sales and profits longer term, Agrawal said.
“We’ve already gotten several hundred million dollars of billings this year, and that’s going to be a big growth vehicle for us longer term for ECS and for the company,” he said.
“What I would say is that we’re going to continue to go through some growing pains. We’re going to get some margin variability,” Agrawal added.
“If you were to think forward a couple of years in terms of when these things get to steady state, we should be able to achieve double the gross margins on these versus what we achieve in the rest of ECS.
“That’s why we’re really excited about it.”
“I will not be one of them”
Bill Austin – who took over as interim CEO in September following the abrupt departure of Sean Kerins – pegged the wider Arrow business’ distribution total addressable market (or ‘DTAM’) at over $250m.
Via ECS and its larger Global Components arm, Arrow address six primary end markets that we serve: transportation, industrial, aerospace and defence, medical, consumer electronics, and data centre.
Global Components, which saw Q3 sales pogo 12% to $5.56bn, is “well positioned to support growth in AI infrastructure build-out”, Austin said.
Austin described ECS as a “nice complement to our electronics business”, saying that much of its portfolio of cybersecurity, data protection, virtualisation, and data intelligence solutions are “on the ramp to AI”.
Recurring revenue volumes are now roughly a third of ECS’ total billings, he added.
“Within our ECS business, we are capitalising on an opportunity to expand our addressable market and accelerate growth through evolving strategic outsourcing arrangements, which we have implemented with multiple large suppliers,” Austin said of its push towards the new strategic outsourcing model.
Austin was quick to rule himself out as a possible candidate to run the NYSE-listed outfit permanently, stressing that he is not even on the candidate list.
“We are fully moving down the path at this point to finding a candidate. We have selected a search firm, which I will not name at this point,” he said.
“We are going to be in the throes of reviewing candidates in the not-too-distant future, but I will not be one of them.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
