The German system house scene was spared the very big upheavals in 2019. There were also takeovers and mergers last year, but not as large as in 2018. For example, Germany’s largest system house, Bechtle AG, bought several IT service providers in 2019.
Especially in Switzerland, Bechtle strengthened itself in 2019 – with the takeover of five IT service providers with a total of over 200 employees. In total, these five companies taken over by Bechtle had a turnover of over 40 million Swiss francs in 2018. The system house used these acquisitions to bundle its presence in Switzerland in a newly merged company, Bechtle Schweiz AG. Before that, four companies operated largely independently side by side. At the end of 2019, Bechtle had around 560 employees in Switzerland and can therefore rightly be regarded as one of the largest IT service providers in our neighboring country.
Bechtle is likely to remain number 1 in the 2021 ranking of Germany’s largest system houses. Because despite the corona pandemic, the Swabians were able to increase their pan-European revenues by 9.3 percent to 1.3557 billion euros in the first quarter of 2020. This is how Bechtle accommodated the massive relocation of many office workers to their home offices. Because there wasn’t enough equipment for that, like notebooks and VPN access. This led to the unexpected additional home office business, in which even thousands of used laptops were reconditioned and made available to the employees of Bechtle customers because the supply with new devices from China dried up.
Photo: CONTEXT
With these additional projects in the home office and collaboration area, Bechtle was able to compensate for other failures caused by the pandemic, for example when equipping customers’ data centers. Company director Thomas Olemotz expects business to normalize again in the course of the third quarter of 2020. Because the demand for solutions to digitize business processes will continue.
In the current year 2020, in the middle of the corona pandemic, Bechtle succeeded in extending the framework agreement with the state of Lower Saxony and winning the Saarland government as a customer. The public sector is of immense importance for the system house from Neckarsulm. The Bechtle Group generates slightly more than a third of its sales with public clients. This makes it easier to cope with a decline in IT investment by other customers, for example in the automotive and mechanical engineering industries.
And so Bechtle was also able to take on at least some of the trainees from companies that are on short-time work or have laid off employees so that they can finish their apprenticeship.
Germany’s second largest system house, Computacenter AG, was able to increase its sales in Germany by 5.3 percent in 2019. This is by no means the growth of Bechtle (almost 17 percent!), But it was easily enough for Computacenter to maintain second place in the ChannelPartner ranking of the largest system houses in Germany.
But there is a new number three in the top 25 ranking – it is Software One. For the first time, the Large Account Reseller (LAR) announced the amount of its sales in Germany, and that was an impressive 1.720 billion euros in 2019. This includes the sales generated in Germany by Comparex AG, which SoftwareOne acquired at the end of 2018.
SoftwareOne Holding AG, which is represented worldwide, had a turnover of 7.3139 billion Swiss francs in 2019, which is more than twice as much as in 2018. This is mainly due to the revenues of Comparex AG, which was included in 2019 and had branches on almost all continents . SoftwareOne Holding AG’s hunger has not yet been satisfied: in the past twelve months alone, the system house has taken over five major IT service providers, for example the Australian AWS expert GorillaStack, the Australian company BNW, the Dutch SAP Specialists B-lay and parts of the Latin American InterGrupo.
Cancom got off to an even better start in 2020 than Bechtle: In the first quarter of 2020, the Munich-based system house was able to increase its turnover by 27.3 percent compared to the previous year to 453.8 million euros. The rate of increase at Bechtle was “only” 9.3 percent in the same period. In March 2020 in particular, Cancom experienced very high demand for software licenses and hardware for mobile working at home, with customers primarily requiring laptops and tablets.
There was a bang at the beginning of 2020: On January 8th, CEO Thomas Volk announced his departure from Cancom – with unusually clear words: There was disagreement about the future strategic development of the company. The new CEO was Rudolf Hotter on February 1, 2020, who has been a member of the Executive Board for 15 years and also held a leading position at Computer Partner AG, Einsteinet and ECS, which were taken over by Cancom.
This sudden resignation could not be due to the key figures for 2019: Cancom’s sales in Germany rose by almost 13 percent to 1.294 billion euros compared to the previous year. This growth has not only been organic, but is due to a number of acquisitions and partnerships.
In October 2019, Cancom took over the British managed service provider Novosco and in the following two months entered into partnerships with two other IT service providers who are to sell Cancom’s cloud management platform AHP in the Netherlands (Detron) and in North America (ExactlyIT). The Munich-based system house is growing rapidly in the cloud business. In the first quarter of 2020, the growth rate in the “Cloud Solutions” segment was 35 percent.
|
rank |
Companies |
2019 |
2018 |
|
1 |
Bechtle AG |
3,336.5 |
2,854.9 |
|
2 |
Computacenter AG & Co. oHG |
2,227.0 |
2,115.0 |
|
3 |
SoftwareOne Germany GmbH |
1,720.0 |
|
|
4th |
T-Systems International GmbH 2) |
1,600.0 |
1,500.0 |
|
5 |
Cancom SE |
1,294.8 |
1,147.0 |
|
6 |
SVA System Sales Alexander GmbH |
887.0 |
713.0 |
|
7th |
Axians in Germany 1) |
825.0 |
553.0 |
|
8th |
msg systems AG 2) |
758.0 |
693.7 |
|
9 |
Atos IT Solutions and Services GmbH 2) |
710.0 |
645.0 |
|
10 |
ACP group 1) |
680.0 |
550.0 |
|
11 |
Infosys Ltd. 2) |
550.0 |
500.0 |
|
12 |
Allgeier SE 2) |
485.9 |
481.5 |
|
13th |
Itelligence AG 1) |
474.7 |
|
|
14th |
Arvato Systems GmbH 2) |
379.2 |
338.0 |
|
15th |
Adesso SE 2) |
361.0 |
308.7 |
|
16 |
Ratiodata GmbH |
329.8 |
296.0 |
|
17th |
Datagroup SE 3) |
320.5 |
269.3 |
|
18th |
Controlware group 3) |
309.0 |
281.0 |
|
19th |
All for One Group SE 2) |
306.5 |
284.5 |
|
20th |
Materna SE 2) |
282.0 |
249.6 |
|
21st |
Logicalis GmbH |
233.0 |
208.0 |
|
22nd |
MR Datentechnik GmbH |
185.5 |
178.0 |
|
23 |
Profi Engineering Systems AG |
151.4 |
163.1 |
|
24 |
Concat AG |
147.54 |
134.0 |
|
25 |
IT House GmbH |
130.0 |
115.0 |
|
26th |
Conet GmbH 2) |
124.2 |
115.9 |
1) Sales in DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland)
2) According to the Lünendonk list 2020, IT consulting and system integration
3) According to the Lünendonk List 2020, IT Services
no management consulting and auditing, i.e. without Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, Roland Berger and PwC
Fiscal year differs in part from the calendar year
Source: ChannelPartner, July 2020
The ranking of the previous years:
The top 25 system houses 2019
The top 25 system houses 2018