Our sister publication Technology Reseller talks to David Watts about the distributor and technology aggregator’s 2025 performance and outlook for 2026.
Technology Reseller (TR): TD SYNNEX recently announced its results for 2025. Are these representative of its performance in the UK and Ireland as well?
David Watts (DW): It was a very strong year across all geographies, and that is being driven by our growth strategy and the investments we’ve made. That strategy’s paying off, but we always say that with humility because the IT market is very competitive and is moving incredibly fast, about as fast as I’ve experienced it, and in all sorts of ways.
Our UK&I results reflect global results in the sense that we grew across all our technology groups and our profit grew nicely in line with our top line. In the UK&I, gross billings were up circa 17% and we grew our market share by about 2.5%. One area that really stood out for us is the endpoint solutions business – PC, peripheral supplies, print – which saw really strong double-digit growth, beyond the 17% figure for the overall company, with PC making up the vast majority of the volume.
That endpoint solutions market is still not massively strong by the way; we still have months and quarters when it goes backwards, but with PC we had a really good run, as did the market, around Windows 11. Strategically, we also took some stronger positions around stock and some of the larger accounts and grew market share there. Critically, because it’s the core of our business, we also grew market share through SMB on endpoint solutions. SMB is a big focus of ours, because 99% of our customer base by quantity is an SMB. Reach and breadth is a core company strategy, and we grew nicely in line with that.
TR: What was your market share in 2025 and how does that compare to previous years?
DW: As an aggregate, it was circa 25-26%, according to Context. Historically, we’ve been a little bit below 25%. Over the last year and a half, we’ve been number one distributor every month and in many of those months we were growing when the market without us was not growing. Some of our competitors, no doubt, had a good year, but some of them definitely didn’t.
TR: Why do you think you had such a good year?
DW: Two strands we’re focused on corporately are firstly our strategic imperatives in terms of where we’re investing and where we’re focusing – that strategy is well understood and well invested in. We also continue to drive our culture very strongly. A lot of companies say that, but that really did happen under our old CEO Rich Hume and it is certainly happening under Patrick Zammit, our CEO of the last two years, and it is certainly happening under me and the board in the UK&I.
We are 100% focused on our values and on developing our people, and we feel that last year we really saw a payoff for driving that culture really hard, empowering people as close to the vendor and the customer as possible and allowing innovation to happen within the company – it’s very important, with AI, that we allow that more and more. Our retention rates are really high; our Glint survey, an internal survey of how people feel about working here, is at record highs; and our gender pay gap is really low, much lower than our top 10 vendors and our top 10 customers, for example.
Culturally, we work really hard, and we’re seeing a payoff from that. You’ve got to have the right strategy, but if you have that and then cultivate the right culture and the right empowerment you will stand out. That’s a real differentiator for us versus a lot of businesses, full stop, and certainly versus our competitors.
TR: Do you have examples of some of the innovation that has been generated internally through this culture?
DW: If I think about it at an operations level, we’ve enabled AI to be deployed through our own tool set. Why through our own tool set? Because you really want to lock down your data, you want to get all the privacy stuff right and you don’t want everybody doing everything all the time just because they think it’s a good idea. We look for ideas, we assess them, we support them, and then we certify them.
People have taken 10-year old problems within our business, which may be around how we provide something simple but absolutely necessary like a very detailed config backlog report, and written agents, supported by us, that in no time do what used to take hours every week – and with no inaccuracies. A bigger example might be how we drive messaging into our customers through Pace, our lifecycle-led approach to engaging partners in the right way, at the right time, based on where they are in their journey.
A lot of that capability has been generated by innovation at a country-level. People in the centre observe how different countries are working and then they take that, improve it and drive it out into the company. It’s not top-down; it’s not consultants coming in; we’re not buying a product. It’s innovation within the business that we capitalise on and then industrialise. They’re different examples at different ends of the scale, but both come down to individuals in the company who have innovated and made a difference.
TR: Picking up on your comments about empowering staff as close to the customer as possible, are events still a big part of your customer engagement activity?
DW: Yes they are, and they’re really well attended. We run events, from vendor and customer CEO gatherings all the way through to individual vendor events and everything in between. The programmes we’re most proud of and that are most transformative for our customers are when we help them build a practice.
One of the most significant of these is to help customers transform into the cloud. We work with them to identify their ability to support their customers into the cloud, we assess them, we work with them to develop the right capability, and then we help them sell. That’s a well baked practice we have for cloud. Security is another good example.
We’ve now launched that practice builder concept for AI, with a program called Destination AI. We do a readiness assessment – How well are you able to deliver AI into your customers? What skills do you have or are you missing in the business? – and then we help take those partners to maturity. ‘Through that registered assessment, we’ve identified gaps in your business’. We help train them, we workshop with them and we help develop AI solutions they can offer to their customers.
The first event we ran, at Heathrow in October, was neither of the things I’ve just described but more of a showcase of what partners can do and how we can support them, and it was over-subscribed almost as soon as we advertised it. The Direction of Technology report which we run each year shows our partners have a really high level of interest in delivering AI solutions, which you’d expect, but how they operationalise that interest to meet a customer need is far from certain. We’re filling that gap for our partners. And you’ll see that programme scale more and more.
TR: Presumably that’s an instance of where the distribution model is very valuable, because your partners probably wouldn’t be able to get a complete view from one vendor.
DW: The nomenclature around what distribution is and what it is not is more complex these days but the need of the end customer is absolutely all about creating a solution and that has to be aggregated across a technology set. And where would you go to get those learnings? You can’t go to an individual vendor, because they’ll only tell you their bit. But with us there’s the opportunity to be taken through the whole technology stack.
It’s quite heavy lifting, though, because at some point the partner is going to move from general awareness and general empowerment and accreditations to what they are actually going to do with their customers and how we can help them. And that isn’t about a platform, although a platform is very important, it’s about supporting partners in a bespoke way.
TR: In your marketing material now you call yourself a technology aggregator and a distributor. Are they very different skills or services?
DW: The challenge is what the word distribution means to individuals. We know what we mean by distribution, which is physical and virtual and all the services that we do to support the customers in those things. That isn’t always obvious to someone coming to us for the first time who might think of a distributor as more of a logistics provider.
One of the reasons we’re working so hard on our branding is to drive our brand outside our reseller base, because there are many partners who are not resellers but still involved in putting deals together. They may buy nothing from us but still influence the buying decision, because they’re partnering with a partner or they’re a consultant. It’s very important they don’t see us just as a distributor but as a solution aggregator as well.
TR: Do you see any problems on the horizon that could make business difficult for you in 2026?
DW: The big questions are going to be, what role will partners have in AI with their customers and what is available for them to sell, because a huge percentage of AI‑enabled chip sets, for example, are going to not many customers. A second feature of the market, but not really a concern, is around components, pricing and supply.
We’ve gone into our financial planning for this year understanding something is going to happen there. We don’t really have any concerns around revenue, because any limit in supply is going to be far outweighed by a rise in the average selling price, but could it interrupt projects and roll-outs or cause people to delay a solution or choose a cloud-based solution instead of a physical hardware solution? It might influence some of those behaviours.
Those are the two features I would highlight. If I look at what the market was trying to solve in 2025, AI apart, it was trying to solve the same problems as in 2024. Nor is the technology so different. It’s just better than it was a year ago.
