Ingram Micro has made a $600m investment in its cloud business over the past decade, its CEO Paul Bay claimed as he discussed how US tariffs may impact the distributor’s business.
The NYSE-listed broadliner – which moved back to public ownership in October – returned to growth in the final quarter of its year to 28 December 2024 (with net revenues rising 2.5% year on year to $13.3bn).
That wasn’t quite enough to tip it into growth for 2024 as a whole, as full-year net revenues slipped 0.1% to $48bn.
Tariff tussle
According to Canalys, US tariffs could accelerate major PC vendors’ efforts to diversify production outside of China (see bottom). HP expects that more than 90% of HP products sold in North America will be built outside of China by the end of its fiscal 2025, its CEO Enrique Lores said on an earnings call last week.
On an earnings call, Bay said that “some” of Ingram’s vendors “continue to focus on making their supply chain networks more resilient and creating mitigation plans”.
“And some that I was talking with in the middle of last year were already working for some time to diversify where their products are being manufactured to minimise the impacts,” Bay added.
“Specifically, I would say there’s some comments around that for the US and how some of our large manufacturers are moving around the world to try and offset that.”
Ingram typically passes through tariffs, Bay said, adding that their potential introduction could actually boost its finance business.
“[One of our partner customers] believes that if the end businesses, if it becomes too much of a price increase… they have to look at how they can finance to really solve that business outcome,” Bay said.
“We’re a different company than we were”
The return to top-line growth Ingram achieved in Q4 “will sustain in 2025”, Bay predicted as the distributor forecast that Q1 revenues will hit between $11.43bn and $11.83bn (2.6% growth at the midpoint).
That will be partly thanks to a rebound in networking, which dropped double-digits for Ingram in both Q4 and full-year 2024, Bay said.
Full-year 2024 income from operations dropped from $944.3m to $817.9m as Ingram battled macro headwinds that “we believe are beginning to shift as we look to 2025”, CFO Mike Silas said.
While flat at $2.45bn, full-year 2024 operating expenses contained an “elevated level” of OpEx associated with Ingram’s investments in digital, Silas revealed.
The figure for 2024 stood at $114.9m, up from $69.8m in 2023, he said.
Bay said Ingram had invested “more than $600m” over “roughly a decade” in building the cloud capabilities that underpin Xvantage, which he billed as an “AI-driven digital experience platform”.
This had made the distributor a “different company” to when it went private in 2016, Bay said.
“Since that time, we have made strong progress on our cloud and digital strategy,” he said.
