By Paul Kunert
26 June 2008
Tough competition in the PC market has forced cash strapped Maxdata out of business, filing for insolvency proceedings in Germany.
This will affect most Maxdata subsidiaries in its German homeland and abroad except the sales operations in Switzerland and the Netherlands.
“The management board has decided on this step because pending illiquidity puts continued business operations at risk,” confirmed a statement issued by Maxdata.
In recent years most of the local PC suppliers across Western Europe have bowed out of business, unable to match the economies of scale of the largest PC vendors.
“The high pressure of competition and the immense fall in prices in the IT industry have affected Maxdata for some years. As a consequence, the company has suffered a heavy decline in turnover and results,” said Maxdata.
Despite putting in place a business recovery strategy Maxdata in 2006, the restructuring programme “the turnaround could neither be achieved in the [financial] year 2007 or the first half of 2008.”
The management aims to continue the business with the support of the insolvency administrator, “securing as many jobs ad possible and retaining the two brands Maxdata and Belinea.
In 2007, Gartner data indicated that more than 92 million desktop, notebooks and servers were shipped in EMEA and Maxdata accounted for 400,000 units, making it the fourteenth largest supplier in the region.
“Maxdata was a bit part player in the market,” said Ranjit Atwal, principal analyst at Gartner, “vendors can’t survive on those sorts of volumes in a global market.”
