IT distributor Westcoast takes over German outfit KOMSA

By Peter Davison

31 October 2022

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Westcoast distributes some of the best-known global IT brands to resellers, retailers and other organisations in UK, the Republic of Ireland and mainland Europe

IT distributor Westcoast has merged with German firm KOMSA in a move to create a united entity that generates €5.5bn of revenue a year.

The Reading-based distributor said the move would hand it access to the German market with the merger being announced as a "strategic partnership" which will eventually see Westcoast take over the shares from KOMSA's founders.

Westcoast, which is the UK's largest distributor by CRN's estimates, already operates in France and Ireland but currently has no significant presence in Europe's largest IT market, Germany. It has in the past attempted to boost its European coverage through the European Wholesale Group, an alliance with several other distributors that was disbanded in 2008.

The merger creates an outfit with revenues of more than €5.5bn, 2,200 employees and which brings together more than 400 technology partners with 30,000 retail partners.

Joe Hemani, chairman and founder of Westcoast, said: "We will bring our know-how from the highly competitive IT market to the world of telecommunications, which will improve the customer experience and range of available services. With access to the German growth market, where we have not been significantly active to date, we are also strategically expanding our market position."

Westcoast is the largest independently owned company in the Thames Valley with revenues of £3.6bn in 2021.

By Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country.

An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts.

Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.