Synnex beats Wall Street analysts for its second fiscal quarter; CEO champions health care and unified communications as growth areas.

Synnex Tuesday beat Wall Street estimates for its second fiscal quarter thanks to what the distributor said were significant gains in its global business services and a gradually stabilising economy.

CEO Kevin Murai said he felt good about Synnex's position.

"Things have stabilized quite a bit, and we have seen signs of the [economy] strengthening over the last five months or so," Murai said in a ChannelWeb.com interview.

"Obviously, we thank our customers for their continued support and we're excited about a number of the key opportunities we're working on."

Synnex reported second-quarter net income of US$19.2 million, or 57 cents a share, up 4 percent from $18.5 million, or 56 cents a share, from the same quarter of 2008.

It reported revenue of US$1.81 billion for the quarter, down about 4 percent from US$1.88 billion in the same quarter a year earlier. Most analysts had predicted earnings of 48 cents a share on revenue of US$1.68 billion.

Murai highlighted three particular areas where he said Synnex would focus heavily in the coming months: unified communications, managed print services and health care.

Synnex in April signed a strategic partnership with Siemens Enterprise Communications, which is trying to bolster its channel presence and which Murai called "one of the cornerstones of our UC business unit."

On the managed print services front, Murai said Synnex had seen continued success with PrintSolv, its managed print services program for VARs, which he said is gaining support even from printer vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark and Xerox that have managed print services programs of their own.

"HP has really embraced what we're doing, and we're working very cooperatively with both Xerox and Lexmark, which although they still have their own programs, understand and recognize what we have is gaining exposure and traction," Murai said.

"What it allows us to do is allow our reseller partners to gain much more visibility into the print environment, introduce new products, and consolidate. When we make a bet we go with both feet in. The solution we have is what sets us apart. We support all manufacturers' print devices."

Murai described Synnex's efforts to grow its health-care offerings as both "narrow" and "deep."

"We look to what markets are presenting business issues and where we can get in dedicated resources, and health care has been ripe for that opportunity for a long time," he said.

"Data capture would have been a technology that would have introduced a lot of efficiency [into health care] years ago. Today, with the move to electronic health records, you're not just assembling the building materials of hardware but creating practice management solutions for physicians."

Murai highlighted Synnex's partnership with EHR vendor AllScripts and suggested the best immediate opportunities for health-care VARs were in physician practice environments that stand to benefit, through incentives, from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

"We're taking the knowledge we gain through partnerships to educate our own customers, get the right customers, and deliver a complete turnkey solution," he said.

"There are well over 300,000 physicians in the U.S. that are not EHR-compliant today. Once we get an EHR solution deployed, that also provides a foundation to drive enhanced productivity and move VARs into other areas like digital imaging and document management."

"Physicians and doctors' offices are small businesses themselves," Murai added. "They represent an optimal market for VARs."

Among particular segments in decline, Murai cited storage, servers and components.

When asked about his thoughts on the biggest channel technology stories of the year so far, Murai suggested the overall weakening of the demand environment, but added that the biggest story by the end of the year would be how the companies who survived and thrived did so.

"The way that we manage through the recession is how we will identify ourselves coming out of it," he said. "One thing we've not done is cut investment to the extent of making our customers and vendor partners suffer, and that's why we're gaining."

For its third quarter, Synnex forecast earnings per share of 58 cents to 61 cents on sales of US$1.8 billion to US$1.9 billion. Those figures are ahead of analyst estimates, which are currently about 51 cents per share on sales of US$1.75 billion.

Synnex's shares gained 3.8 percent, or 96 cents per share, in after-hours trading following the quarterly report.

See original article on CRN.com