Sony Looks To Midwich For Growth

Midwich is to distribute the complete range of Sony commercial and consumer projectors.

The move, effective May 1, comes as part of a channel restructure by Sony. Midwich is to focus its efforts for Sony on creating demand within ‘stronghold’ sectors, including SMEs, corporate and education.

‘Looking from the outside, it’s been quite obvious to us that Sony needed a proactive distributor to kick start its business within a number of channels. Unfortunately, there are not many focused a-v distributors who can service both a-v and IT resellers’, says Midwich divisional director Darren Lewitt.

Commenting on other distribution changes, Lewitt adds that now other distributors ‘have moved away from product specialisation to take a “multi-brand” approach’, suggesting that Midwich can provide more focus on the Sony brand than others.

However, Midwich itself now handles six Japanese projector brands. The others are Epson, NEC, Sanyo, Toshiba and Panasonic.

To deal with the business, Midwich has now set up two a-v sales teams, one of which will focus purely on Sony products (including the plasmas for which Midwich took on distribution in January).

‘We feel that our other brands will benefit from Sony coming on board’, says Lewitt. ‘Experience has shown us that when we add a major new vendor the phones ring more and this will result in leads for other brands’.

www.midwich.com