2. ALSO goes West with British buy
When? February
The UK’s largest distributor, Westcoast, officially became part of mainland European peer ALSO in February, creating a €15bn-sales juggernaut.
Having first announced its intention to acquire the Theale-based broadliner last July, ALSO sealed the deal on 28 February 2025.
Westcoast topped IT Channel Oxygen’s most-recent Top 50 Must-Know UK IT Distributors.
In its recent interim report, Switzerland-based ALSO revealed that it paid a total consideration of €552.7m for Westcoast and that Westcoast contributed €1.31bn to its interim €5.93bn net sales.
The integration of Westcoast will take place “over several years”, with individual topics “being prioritised based on profitability potential”, ALSO said in March.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen in the wake of the deal, Informa Fellow Steve Brazier said that the duo had been “flirting for a long time”.
ALSO supplies Westcoast with its ALSO Cloud Marketplace, he noted.
“If you’re going to ask the question ‘why now’? the world of distribution has become more based around the tools and systems, particularly cloud marketplaces, and it doesn’t make sense for both to develop independent systems,” Brazier said.
“It makes much more sense to get scale through one system, so there are obvious synergies there.”
See final page for the year’s biggest distribution story…
