With the Tech Pacific acquisition legally consummated on May 1, 2005, this was the first complete year for Ingram Micro in its new avatar. While Ingram became a Rs 5,517 crore company in 05-06, if compared with Rs 4,788 crore, which was the combined revenue of Ingram and Tech Pacific in 2004-05, then the growth was just 15%. This is far less than what both grew as separate companies in 2004-06 fiscal.

A big challenge faced by Ingram post merger was that of credit enablement. The total number of sub-distributors and resellers stood close to 12,000, of which 4,000 were its earlier partners who enjoyed credit from Ingram. However, many vendors still looked out for an alternate strategy to mitigate the risk of having all eggs in one basket. eSys best leveraged this opportunity and owed its meteoric rise to the Ingram-Tech Pacific merger.

However, Ingram streamlined its processes to avoid any disruption for vendors and partners.

In terms of revenues, the combined shares were more or less maintained-the slight growth in software was neutralized by the marginal dip of about 10% in the HP peripherals business. The PC consumer market was a growth area for almost all vendors in the Ingram portfolio. Not surprisingly, therefore, HP continued to be the largest contributor to the overall Ingram kitty followed by Lenovo. Besides that, Microsoft, Cisco, Epson, Lexmark and Sun were the other businesses that grew in 2005-06. Now that Ingram has stabilized, 2006-07 will be a year to keep an eye on this distribution giant.

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