Company Connections

By Dick Hughes  

AUGUST 24, 2010 8:27 a.m. (0)

When Bob Stegner arrived in Greenville a couple of years ago as senior vice president for North American marketing for Synnex Corp., he found a lot of people didn’t understand what the company was.

This despite these facts:

· Synnex is the only Fortune 500 company (No. 294) with corporate headquarters in Greenville, albeit one of two the company has. The other is in Fremont, Calif.

· From 40 or 50 employees, it now has 700 in Greenville, and the workforce is expected to grow faster than any other location. Greenville employs more people than any other Synnex operation outside a call center in the Philippines, where 3,000 work.

· Synnex had revenues of $7.7 billion in 2009 and has had 92 consecutive profitable quarters.  The North American operation directed from Greenville accounts for 98 percent of Synnex’s revenue.

· When high fuel prices hit in 2007 and the downturn followed, business slowed but, says Stegner, “we are very good at cost-containment … and you won’t see Synnex do a lot of layoffs or anything that.”

· In recent acquisitions, Synnex extended its reach into retail electronics.  It acquired leading video game distributor Jack of All Games of West Chester, Ohio, for $44 million in March and New Age Electronics of Carson, Calif., a large distributor of retail electronics, for $54.3 million in 2008.   Both units are directed from Greenville and brought new jobs.

· Synnex established a distribution center in Greenville in 1999, merged it with the distribution division purchased from Gates-Arrow in 2002 and added 50,000 square feet to the former Gates-Arrow building on Pelham Ridge Drive in 2008.

Synnex largely is unfamiliar to the general public because it doesn’t sell to retail consumers, even while it is a critical link in the IT supply chain that puts ubiquitous products from the likes of HP, Microsoft and Panasonic into consumers’ hands through retailers from Best Buy to ma and pa stores.

Among its other businesses, Synnex is a global supplier of components to electronic manufacturers and provider of business processing services.

To “do a better job of promoting the fact that we reside in Greenville,” Synnex hired a public relations firm, the Hughes Agency, ramped up activities in civic organizations and took the “big step” of becoming the BMW Charity Pro-AM‘s first presenting sponsor, giving it shared billing under a three-year agreement.

Synnex took full advantage of this year’s event, boosting morale with free tickets for employees, bringing “50 or so of our top customers from throughout the United States” to town, getting worldwide TV exposure on the Golf Channel and taking pride in the “support of something like 99 charities.”

“It accomplished a lot,” says Stegner. “It got us very good visibility and not just in Greenville and the surrounding communities.”

Now, he says, when an employee is asked where they work, people say, “oh, you are the presenting sponsor of the BMW Pro-Am. That is visibility, and I think we needed that.”

Robert “Bobby” Hitt, manager of corporate affairs for BMW in Greer, said Synnex always supported the PGA event but wanted a larger role and BMW was “delighted to have them as a presenting sponsor,” the first time in the 10 years of the event it has shared billing.

“I think things like being presenting sponsor of the BMW Pro-Am is positive for Synnex and for the Upstate,” said Ben Haskew, president of the Greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce.

Haskew said Synnex has a history of involvement with the Chamber but recently has seen “more people in upper management involved in Chamber activities, and that’s a good thing for them and for us.”

It’s all part of Stegner’s campaign to not only promote Synnex to Greenville and the Upstate but also to sell the Upstate’s business climate and family lifestyle as a relocation address for other businesses.

“Quite frankly, the community needs to know that there are Fortune 500 companies residing in this town and how important that is to recruiting new businesses and getting new people in here,” he says.

When Synnex is recruiting, Stegner takes them downtown and the city does the rest.

“It is absolutely amazing.  I guarantee, it’s a sure thing.”

The Greenville corporate office is responsible for marketing, sales, customer service, credit and product management, “really everything except the corporate and some of the financial operations are done here.  Financial operations are done in Fremont and China.”

Synnex supplies components for manufacturers such as HP, distributes a wide assortment of electronic products to retailers; is the middleman with companies like NWN of Greenville that design and install high-tech communication systems for institutions as large as hospital systems and as small as a lawyer’s office; and in its most recent acquisition supplies video games to retailers.

Stegner says Best Buy and other retailers don’t stock most items they sell, such as computers.

“You would go in and buy that and you might walk over and buy Microsoft Office, you might buy Symantec for security.  The majority of that probably came from one our warehouses.”

Greenville Hospital System, for example, would work with a firm like NWN on “all the things they need for their network, their video conferencing or all their TVs for digital signage … NWN would talk to one of our sales people and order the equipment.  NWN may ask us to put on the software, and we would ship it directly to Greenville Hospital, and the people from NWN would install it.”

The company was founded in 1980 by Robert Huang, a Taiwanese who spent his childhood and school years in Japan, earned two master’s degrees in the United States and settled in California.  Huang took the company public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2003.  He retired in 2008.

Comments

Add New

Leave a Comment
Comments are moderated and may not be posted immediately.
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."