FEATURE ALEX TATHAM
18 www.technologybusinesstoday.com April 2019 MANAGING
CHANGE
Alex Tatham, MD of IT Distributor Westcoast, is enjoying
another year of sustained growth despite challenging trading
conditions. In this interview, Tatham spoke to TBT about the
Westcoast journey and how the business is helping partners
succeed in a world dominated by cloud services.
Relaxed as always, Tatham brings
a certain level of calm and sense
to most conversations. Despite
the country’s political system
in utter turmoil Tatham’s voice of reason
has led the distributor to yet another
consistent year of growth.
Westcoast’s latest financials revealed
10-11% growth in revenues to £2.465bn
last year, which equated to about £24m
in profit.
“We are a big business (1,372 staff
members) in a low margin world. We
also have some of the lowest costs in
the business, our overall SG&A costs are
about 1.6%. That is a very attractive cost
to any vendor that wants to reach the
mass UK and Ireland markets.”
On the year ahead Tatham says “Our
target this year is for double figure
revenue growth and that will filter
through to the margins. As always, we
are looking to deliver sustainable profit
margins to our shareholders …which is
100% Joe Hemani!”
“Joe is still involved in the business
and he is energised, he has the drive and
hunger which really exudes itself to all
his directors.”
The numbers are looking good,
but where is the growth coming from
exactly?
Tatham continues “The retail business
is growing, despite the fact the market is
challenging right now. We are winning
good share because we have a very
strong service for retail to take to their
customers. That was around £420m last
year. There is more to come this year
because vendors are attracted by that
low cost we have in the business, which
helps drive good value into retailers.
We are expecting that to grow another
10% this year despite the fact the overall
retail market is going backwards.”
Direct fulfilment has been a strong
area of growth for the outfit as vendors
struggle to cope with the demands of
end users “We are going to be doing a lot
of direct fulfilment on behalf of vendors,
again they are attracted by our cost and
efficiencies. We are a Pan-European
business and we have warehouses all
across Europe. It doesn’t matter what
type of vendor it is, we can do it.”
Westcoast has quadrupled the size
of its Configuration Centre in order to
service vendors, this has been driven
partly by Brexit, normally the preserve
of Eastern Europe we now are expecting
to see an upsurge in local configuration
across the board this year.
When it came to asking about
Westcoast’s cloud business Tatham
paused to draw breath. “It’s growing
like crazy, it will probably grow fifty to
sixty percent this year. When resellers
commit to us we grow the business
from within. As soon as the customers
move onto Azure, and we are supporting
them, they typically start spending more
money on additional services.”
Tatham believes there is a huge
opportunity for the Channel in the SMB
space when it comes to the cloud. “The
enterprise is mostly there, or at least for
ninety five percent of them, in the SMB
space it is probably nearer a third, that
means there is bucket loads of space to
grow for the Channel.”
“The world has moved on, I think
everyone realises we are moving to a
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