TD Synnex UK boss on how people make the difference in business

A scan of the recent TD Synnex results will lead most to conclude that the distributor’s growth came largely from pursuing a strategy to focus on high and margin-rich growth technologies.

That is true, but underneath that strategy is the impact of the distie’s staff. And when it comes to its growth in the UK and its market share gains, it is the contribution of the firm’s team that has driven success.

David Watts, senior vice-president for UK and Ireland (UK&I) at TD Synnex, is looking to build on the recent momentum and deliver growth again in the region.

“Probably most pleasing around the results is that they’re built on a clear strategy that is clearly working,” he added. “We’ve had a good year in UK and Ireland. Our results are built on similar commentary to the corporate results.”

Watts expected 2025 to be a challenging year and, as a result, “any growth that we were going to [gain] was going to be on us”. The pressure was on for the firm, as the target was to grow in every technology segment and every customer channel – and not just in the high growth areas of artificial intelligence (AI), cloud and security.

The UK market did not particularly grow last year, so those looking for improvements had to take market share and deepen relationships with existing customers.

Watts said the channel player took a lot of market share and achieved its ambition of growing in all unit segments: “We grew about three-and-a-bit percent market share, which is stellar. Half a percent market share growth is pretty good, so 3% is really good.”

People were the reason that growth happened and why the distributor will continue to take the same approach in the year ahead, said Watts.

“We’re very present in the market. The market is busy and technology is changing. Our customers need our support; therefore we have to be out there. We have more people deployed in the field, loads of technical resource. We run a lot of events, supporting transformation in customers as they get into new technologies,” he said.

An example of how that works in action is the distie’s brand promise campaign to make relationships personal and to provide customers with the chance to have an interface with the business.

“We’ve pushed that really hard in the past year around our relationships events,” said Watts. “We have more people out in the field and running more events than we’ve ever done. We’ve had an e-commerce site since 1999. The tools are there and they get better all the time. But if you want to speak to someone, if you want to visit or attend an event, we want you to do that too.”

What that looks like in action could be seen at a recent AI event that the distributor held to support partners and help them to identify where they were on their journey to adopt and support the technology. Sign-ups and attendance were strong and the appetite for personal enablement underlined the benefits of providing the personal touch.

Anyone looking for ideas of how TD Synnex will approach 2026 only need to look back at last year to get a sense of the strategy and the approach to delivering support.

“What you’re seeing accelerating, though, is the tool set,” said Watts. “Why? Because it’s complex and data-based, and we need to work with them and differentiate from a high scale of marketplaces. We need to be aggregating solutions for our customers, with ISV solutions, and we need to enable these people to talk together. There’s no platform providing all of that yet, and our platform is going in that direction really fast.

“The technologies that are going to be big this year were the ones that were big last year, and they are a focus for us. But what you’ll see more of is [looking at how] we take our partners on a transformation to wherever they’re going. AI is the big-ticket item, so once that’s up and running, how do we support customers to manage their data and transact with their own customers? And that’s where the toolset comes in,” he added.

Watts is cautious about forecasting rising levels of market growth and is keen to stress the winning approach is to focus on gaining market share and being able to tap into increased customer spending when that returns to the market.

“A lot of people are predicting some growth,” said Watts. “I just think they were predicting growth last year too. Growth is on us – we have to be more competitive, we need to improve our performance and we will have a part to play.”