Corex was initially set up as a components distributor and, although it has grown and changed radically since those early days, components are still one of the pillars of the organisation.
Today, the consumer business unit carries components together with some gaming hardware, home automation and storage – which is backbone of this business.
Angie van der Walt, the consumer business unit manager at Corex, explains that the WD storage offering is the core product line that opens doors. “Every market and every vertical has a need for storage, so it’s the main driver for the consumer team.”
Other offerings in the business unit include flash drives, CPUs, networking and day-to-day consumer products like chassis and gaming components. Home and small business networking also fall into the consumer business unit, along with some notebooks and Internet of Things (IoT) as it relates to home security and automation.
When Corex talks about consumers, their definition is perhaps broader than the rest of the market, embracing home users as well as SME and enterprise users.
Van der Walt points out that there is a pressing need for everyone to store their data – but many people don’t have the necessary know-how.
“There are so many different products in the storage space – USB, memory cards, internal drives, network-attached storage (NAS) both onsite or with cloud access, portable cloud devices and more – that its often difficult to make a choice.”
Corex helps its partners to identify customers’ pain points and choose the most appropriate storage option. “Once they have fulfilled the immediate need, the team can go further to see what else the customer might require. For instance, if the customer buys a NAS, the obvious next step is to check if they need a home network.”
Storage technology isn’t standing still either: solid state drives (SSDs) are growing rapidly. “SSD is a big driver and focus for the Corex team,” Van der Walt says. “We have been representing WD as the sole SSD distributor for the last two years. The brand is now the number one in the South African market, having grown from nowhere.”
Products and solutions
The consumer product line-up includes the following brands:
- WD – the full range of storage offerings, including SSD, internal and mobile which incorporates SANdisk flash and security. The WD portfolio covers components, digital video, security and surveillance, CCD, desktop, NAS and internal drives
- TP-Link – home and SME networking products, including routers, access points (Aps), switches and WiFi cards
- Synology – NAS
- QNap – NAS
- Components – a wide range of brands covering motherboards, processors, drives, LG monitors and a variety of white box PC components
- 360 – home IoT solutions
- Dell – monitors and laptops
“Everyone says the PC market is dead, and to a point it is,” Van der Walt says. “But our PC offering is in specific verticals, so the demand is still very much alive.
“We also offer workstation products, including CPUs, motherboards, graphics cards and storage, which are in demand in verticals that require high-performance desktop computing.”
In a business where most of the offerings are components, it would be easy for Corex to simply take orders and ship products without offering much in the way of value-add.
Instead, the distributor aims to provide holistic solutions, says Van der Walt. “We have a range of products that can fulfill all of a customer’s needs; and a team that offers support. We can tailor a solution around the customer’s specific needs, to fulfill the solution requirements that our reseller has.”
Alongside this, Corex manages inventory levels to provide the best possible match for its partners requirements.
Going forward, Van der Walt aims to increase storage sales, particularly in SSD.
“One of the trends we are seeing is that SSD is still ramping up, while prices are coming down. We think SSD will start to replace hard drives (HDD) even though it is still lagging when it comes to capacity. We believe HDD will become the preferred media for long-term storage, with SSD taking over as the direct drive.”
As cloud takes off, NAS is enjoying a resurgence in popularity as people look to set up their own private cloud storage, Van der Walt adds.
As the new year unfolds, security will continue to be a major issue for all users, she adds.
Growth will be experienced on a variety of fronts, with better fibre penetration driving a need for more home networking and storage.
“There are a lot of initiatives to get the country connects, so more people than ever before will have access,” says Van der Walt.
Alongside this, content creation is growing apace, with the amount of data reaching into the petabyte and exabyte range. This is fueling demand for more storage, and also for content creation hardware.”