After almost 6 years of successful cooperation, the European Wholesale Group strategic alliance - consisting of ALSO Holding AG (CH), Copaco N.V. (NL) and Esprinet S.p.A. (I) - will be dissolved. Since EWG was founded in 2002 all partners have become multinational distributors. They have also achieved the critical size and met the targets required by the major European IT vendors.

In October 2002, four leading distributors - ALSO Holding AG (CH), Copaco N.V. (NL), Esprinet S.p.A. (I) and Westcoast (UK) - founded the EWG strategic alliance to achieve three objectives: (1) To bring profitable growth to their strategic vendor partners, (2) to increase their own efficiency sharing best demonstrated practices across the alliance and (3) to support the alliance partners to become international and reach critical mass. HP was the first vendor to recognize the EWG as its pan-European partner. Further agreements followed with Fujitsu Siemens in 2004 and one year later with Canon Europe.

When EWG was founded in 2002, the alliance partners were active in five countries and had combined sales of EUR 2.5 billion. During the last 5½ years EWG expanded its presence to 16 countries and virtually trebled combined sales to EUR 6.1 billion. Since then, the present partners in the alliance have all achieved critical size and developed into strong multinational distribution companies. All of them are among the most efficient competitors in the European IT market. Thus EWG has achieved its objectives and will be dissolved.

"I am very proud of EWG's success," admits Alex Sozonoff, Chairman and President of EWG. "To realize growth through expansion along EWG’s four axes strategy “vendor partners”, “customer segments”, “product areas” and “geographies” was very successful. Last but not least I’m very pleased, that our strategic vendor partners, our customers as well as the alliance partners have benefited equally from EWG”, he concludes.

Further information:
Alex Sozonoff, Chairman and President of European Wholesale Group
Tel. +41 41 266 18 02