ELKO Group held its traditional Convention during September 8-11. The event gathered in Riga managers from ELKO Group head-office and sales offices together with company’s key business partners from 30 world-renowned IT manufacturers (among them Intel, Seagate, Western Digital, Sony, Samsung, Microsoft, Acer, and others). In total over 150 participants took part in the event.
During the Convention ELKO Group managers from countries and the headquarters had a productive internal ELKO Group conference, followed by two days with ELKO Group business partners when ELKO Group senior management updated vendors on ELKO's strategies, visions, and plans. As well ELKO Group product managers and sales & marketing team had useful meetings with vendors where opportunities for further successful cooperation and mutual growth were discussed.
“Our slogan is – Grow to succeed. And we can also say – Grow to lead,” states president of ELKO Group Egons Mednis, “ELKO Group ambition is to be the role model in the industry and to be number one IT distributor in the new Europe.”
“ELKO Group brings an advanced IT product portfolio to customers in one of the world’s fastest growing areas – CIS, Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries”, says Jens Hartmann, ELKO Group CEO. Markets where ELKO Group operates can be divided in three main groups – the new EU member countries, next EU accession group and EU neighbours. “With the currently low IT spending ratios and expected high economy growth in next years these regions present a huge potential for IT segment development. The EU accession will also make more funding options available which will drive additional investment in IT,” J.Hartmann is confident about the growth of the IT industry in new Europe.
As a result of successful strategy implementation and optimization of sales offices operations ELKO Group plans to reach turnover of USD 420 million by the end of 2004 which is almost 20% increase to compare with 2003. In first half of the 2004 ELKO Group has reached USD 186.4 million turnover which showed a 23% increase to compare with the same period last year and gives a sound reason to believe that the 2004 plan will be achieved.
ELKO Group is constantly working on balancing its portfolio to meet the demands of customers and in 2004 company has added products of several new vendors by starting cooperation in different regions with AOC, GNR, Relisys, Samsung Semiconductor, Hynix Semiconductor, Lite-on, Intenso, Q-TEC, HMS, Microdowell, D-link, Tyan, Umax, KME, Ge-Cube, and MSI.
