Three brands. One market. A race to the bottom.

By the time the components business at Tech Data had grown, the challenge was no longer simply how to add more vendors or increase volume.

We had created a different problem.

Across categories such as memory and graphics, we were carrying several brands with products that were often technically very similar, aimed at overlapping customers and competing for the same transactions.

On paper, that looked like choice.

Commercially, it could quickly become a race to the bottom.

If three brands offer almost interchangeable products and nobody has clearly defined why a customer should choose one over another, price becomes the easiest differentiator.

And in distribution, that is dangerous.

When market prices rise, inventory can become more valuable and margins improve. But when prices fall, stock bought yesterday suddenly has to compete with cheaper stock arriving today. If several brands inside your own portfolio are then discounting against each other as well, you start creating margin pressure from both sides.

The complexity was amplified by scale.

We were managing large numbers of SKUs, each with different stock levels, product lifecycles, vendor pressures and price movements. Some products were new and constrained. Others were approaching end of life. Some vendors wanted volume. Others wanted premium positioning.

Without a clearer structure, the portfolio risked becoming commercially self-defeating.

The problem was not that we had too many products. It was that too many products were being asked to compete for the same reason.

That led me back to a basic question:

What role should each brand and product actually play in the portfolio?

Instead of organizing the category primarily around vendor names, I started thinking about how customers themselves approached the market.

There were customers looking for high-end gaming performance. Others were upgrading existing systems. Retail had different pricing and packaging dynamics again. And there was always a budget segment where cost mattered most.

That suggested a different way of structuring the business.

Rather than allowing every brand to compete across the same commercial space, we could define clearer subcategories such as high-end gaming, upgrading, retail and budget, then position brands and products deliberately within them.

Suddenly, the same products had context.

Sales had a clearer reason for recommending one option over another. Customers had a more understandable buying logic. Vendors could grow without automatically cannibalising each other. And pricing became easier to manage because the portfolio was no longer forcing everything into direct comparison.

The key shift was simple:

we stopped treating portfolio breadth as a collection of products and started managing it as a system of distinct commercial roles.

That created clearer positioning, more stable margins and a portfolio that could scale without continuously competing with itself.

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