Insight’s outgoing CEO says she expects prices to rise by on average 15% in 2026 as she confirmed plans to appoint a successor “in the next few months”.
In what will be her final full-year earnings call, Mullen conceded it had been a “challenging year” for the Nasdaq-listed ‘AI solutions integrator’ – which ranked ninth in Oxygen 250 2026.
For the 12 months ended 31 December 2025, the global products, solutions and services giant saw net sales fall 5% to $8.25bn, while gross profit came in flat at $1.76bn.
Insight also underwhelmed some of the analysts on the call by issuing a more conservative guidance for 2026 than previous years (it expects gross profit to grow “low single digits”).
“I think one thing that’s different is we aren’t assuming any kind of massive improvement and spend in the large enterprise,” Mullen said on the call as she sought to contextualise the guidance.
“We’re expecting prices to increase 15%”
Price rises fuelled by the memory chip crisis could be a double-edged sword for the industry, Mullen said as she noted price elasticity has historically “kicked in” at around 15%.
“As an industry, we’re expecting prices to increase 15% or so on average, and units to decline just barely – low single digits,” she said.
Specifically on PCs, prices will rise by between 10% and 25% this year, Mullen said.
“We’ve seen those price increases documented from most of the OEMs. A few have decided not to do that,” she said.
Echoing recent comments by TD Synnex CEO Patrick Zammit, Mullen predicted the shortages could even hand partners a strategic advantage, just as they did through the pandemic.
“I think there’s also an incredible opportunity for us to help our customers navigate the supply chain impacts, which is what we did pretty well during Covid, and help them understand alternatives,” Mullen said.
“So this is, I think, a place where partners can add a whole lot of value, and Insight will add a whole lot of value to our customers as they navigate that.”
“It landed very, very close”
Addressing the other elephant in the vestibule, CFO James Morgado conceded in an answer to an analyst question that “we certainly would love to not have to talk about partner programme changes ever again”.
He was referring to the $70m hole Insight predicted recent Microsoft and Google partner programme changes would blow in its 2025 gross profits.
“The $70m gross profit impact we called out at the beginning of the year… it landed very, very close to that number…,” Morgado said.
Although Insight has completed the internal “pivot” of its cloud business towards the midmarket, the pain is not quite over, Morgado acknowledged.
“We see that tail [of financial impact] a little more in the second half [of 2026], candidly, and that is because of the dynamics associated with Google,” he said, referencing Insight’s SADA business.
“Very, very excited”
Insight’s expansion of its technology consulting capabilities during the year boosted its overall performance, especially in EMEA, Mullen said.
In Q4, services generated 28% of the $343.9m EMEA net sales total (up from 23% a year previously). Gross margins in the region rose from 22.7% to 27.5% year on year on the same basis.
Mullen also tipped AI data centres as a “significant tailwind”.
“There are definitely cost constraints associated with running everything [AI] in a public cloud, so we have seen more interest in on-premises,” she said.
“Our partners are making that easier with pre-packaged AI factories – as I noted we were the first partner to launch the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA into our labs. So we believe we are ready to see enterprise adoption of AI infrastructure, specifically in data centres and specifically in a multi-cloud environment.”
Mullen said she is “very, very excited” about the opportunity here, but added “we are absolutely at the very beginning stages”.
“This should be a significant tailwind for the industry as we move beyond just funding the public clouds and the neo clouds in terms of building out data centres,” she said.
Having revealed plans to retire in November, Mullen said in her prepared remarks that Insight’s public external search for a successor is “progressing as planned”.
“We expect to name a successor in the next few months,” she said.
