Reseller acquires Joensuun Datalaite

Giant Nordic reseller Ementor has moved to bolster its presence in eastern Finland after admitting the country’s largest firms have slammed the brakes on spending.

The VAR, which uses the Atea brand in Finland, snapped up service specialist Joensuun Datalaite, adding offices in seven new cities in the east of the country.

Dan Högström, managing director at Atea Finland, said: “Companies such as Nokia are moving a lot of work abroad and are therefore not increasing their purchasing in Finland. Our strategy is to be present all over Finland, because future growth will come from smaller companies.”

Högström said the acquisition would also bring the firm’s Finnish business more in line with the wider group’s focus on services.

“Joensuun Datalaite gives us more presence in services, both in high-end consulting and hardware maintenance. We can now deploy these services all over Finland,” he said.

“Atea Finland gets 6 per cent of its revenues from services. The average in the Ementor group is 15 per cent, so we are clearly lagging behind in Finland and are trying to catch up.”

With UK patterns often lagging a year or so behind the Nordics, Högström was keen to highlight a recent trend in business models among Finnish VARs.

“In volume sales, we are increasingly integrating into our customers’ purchasing processes and systems. Shopping over the web is the future in Finland,” he said.

The Finnish PC market is set to shrink from 722,000 units to 672,000 units this year, according to figures from research house the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO). EITO also expects the wider computer hardware market to drop 4.9 per cent in value in 2007.