During May 5-7 ELKO Group held ELKO Group Baltic & Central and Eastern Europe Workshop 2005 - an extensive workshop with participants from ELKO sales offices and headquarters and our business partners. The event gathered in Sigulda - one of Latvia’s most inspiring cities - administration, sales, finance, logistics and marketing managers from ELKO HQ and sales offices in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia, and Slovakia. World’s leading IT manufacturers such as ATI, Creative, Digitex, eProformance, Gigabyte, HMS, Hitachi, Lexmark, Samsung, Seagate, Sweex and UMAX were invited and joined the workshop to discuss the regional business specifics in retail IT segment. In total 90 participants took part in the workshop.


A process of IT products entering the home electronics segments is irreversible and it is inevitably changing the purchasing pattern of the IT products. This in turn leads to channel extension and brings for ELKO Group new opportunities to grow in this yet new to ELKO retail world. During retail workshop ELKO presented its view on the current situation in the Baltic & CEE retail IT markets which offer wide opportunities, but also have many constraints and own rules to be respected. All workshop participating vendors emphasized how their products will contribute to ELKO retail portfolio and their readiness to support ELKO on our way to expand the retail business. Moreover, partners from ATI, Digitex, ePro, and Umax shared their experience and advice to ELKO about main rules how to survive and succeed in retail market.

During the workshop an important announcement was made about ELKO cooperation start with Hitachi Global Storage, hard drive vendor offering one of the broadest product portfolios. This proves that ELKO does not only think about new opportunities and expansion in retail but also continuously works to remain the strongest component distributor in the region.

While retail workshop was focused on evaluating the retail market opportunities, internal ELKO workshops gathered teams from administration, sales, financial, logistics and marketing in smaller groups where participants discussed how to improve the efficiency of operations and become even more competitive player in the market.

“As the digitalization enters in every corner of everybody’s lives, expanding from the office into the living room, more fast support and flexible supply chains are required. And we can fulfill the diverse needs of the customers in our regions,” states ELKO Group CEO Jens Hartmann, “We have never been more excited about the relevance of our capabilities and the growth prospects of the increasingly diverse markets that we serve. We will continually evaluate and refine both our plans and our business model in order to take full advantage of the opportunities in front of us.”