Arrow has just had the most successful year in its 83 year old history.
CEO Michael Long said that an 18 percent sales increase in the final quarter of the year propelled Arrow’s total 2017 revenue haul to $26.81 billion which is a 13 percent rise. Ignoring a $125 million hit from changes relating to US tax regulations, net income also rose from $182 million to $224 million.
Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) arm recorded a 10 percent revenues increase to $2.69 billion. Its components arm saw revenues rise 24 per cent to $4.94 billion.
Long told the assembled throngs on a conference call that this outfit delivered unprecedented growth in 2017.
“This growth validates our strategy and inspires us to push forward to 2018 and the years ahead,” he said.
Arrow thinks the storage market reached a “turning point” during Q4, with new form factors driving the growth of its storage revenues in both the Americas and EMEA.
“Last year, we thought that the storage piece would cross over in the third quarter,” Long said.
“It happened in the fourth quarter that we saw the growth… What’s exciting or what drove us down was there was a pretty good budget flush on hardware, and that changed our mix a bit. But I still read into that as good news.”
Cloud now a $1bn-a-quarter business for Arrow
The 10 percent sales rise at ECS was underpinned by “strong growth” in infrastructure software and cloud sales, Long said.
He added that the company is on target for its $1bn cloud services quarter run rate target.
“If we take out December, we exceeded the $1bn run rate,” he said. “It’s still growing at a strong rate. It’s going to be exciting. And since you asked about that, we might as well tell you that digital is well over the $1bn mark at this point, too. So both of those activities are ramping and going very strong.”
