Utilizing many of the integrated AV technologies that are now the mainstays of the Covid era remote work environment, Exertis convened its first ever Virtual Vendor Summit Executive session yesterday before a global audience, offering an option for vendors seeking a path forward in 2021 and beyond.
“Exertis is your strategic growth partner,” Exertis president & CEO Kevin Kelly told vendors. “We are the one global distribution partner that offers the most stability and the greatest range of resources that can help you grow your business region by region, category by category, here in North American and around the world.”
Amplifying further on the scale of that opportunity, DCC Technology managing director Tim Griffin told attendees that DCC is a 43-year-old FTSE 100 company that employs 13,000 people around the world. “We seek to grow by 15 percent a year through a market commitment to specialism and a maniacal focus on meeting the needs of our customers in each specialist area. We enable people and businesses to grow and progress, evolve our specialist brands to provide global opportunities to our vendors, and expand our geographical footprint through acquisitions.”
Exertis International managing director Clive Fitzharris drove the point home even further, noting that, “In the last five years alone Exertis has invested more than 2.5 billion pounds on 100 acquisitions and we’re not even close to being finished with our growth through acquisition strategy. We will continue to be bold on new businesses and platforms that enable our team to make the extraordinary happen each and every day for our customers.”
Reviewing the current business environment, Kelly emphasized that 2020 was a year of two halves. “2019 was the best year in history for the commercial AV industry and for our company, and 2020 started off like a rocket with major installations across all of our vertical markets. And then Covid brought the world, and our industry, to a standstill. The months of April and May were challenging but then, in July, business started to rebound as customers invested heavily in the technologies and solutions that meet the needs of the new remote based workforce. This resurgence continues with our overall sales up 21 percent in the second half of the year.”
Looking forward to 2021, Kelly promised vendors that they will experience Exertis as a company organized around a platform of value-added services that include marketing, sourcing, supply chain management, and logistics, as well as increased digitalization and automation of the business. “We are committed to working with you to expand the size of your total available market.”
Kelly said that the company’s current vendor and reseller portals were being enhanced to offer a greater degree of automation and self-service. “At the end of the day, we can achieve new levels of efficiency and add new value to our relationship by using digitalization to streamline the way we do business,” Kelly explained. “We want to empower our vendor and reseller partners to be able to self-manage their businesses on our portals and be able take advantage of a new array of automated marketing programs, financial management tools, payment options and analytics.”
Looking toward areas of opportunity, Kelly said that the company will invest heavily in dvLED display, interactive whiteboards, collaboration, and hospitality categories. “These are the areas that are growing the fastest as the world returns to work, school, and play,” he stressed.
Kelly also said that a new business unit will be brought from Europe to North America in 2021 — Exertis Enterprise. Joining Exertis ProAV and Exertis Mobile Living in offering custom solutions for specific specialty areas, Exertis Enterprise will offer server, storage, networking, security, software, component, cloud, power, and connectivity services.
“We believe that the new normal that is emerging today is going to be a better normal for society as a whole and for the commercial AV industry we are a part of,” Kelly concluded. “Exertis offers you the best opportunity to grow and expand your business in this new normal world.”
For more information, visit https://www.exertis.com/.
This article originally ran on residentialsystems.com
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