South Africa-based IT distributor Axiz, has welcomed business relaxation restrictions that have allowed channel companies to resume operations at the start of this month.
While operating under Level 4 conditions is nowhere near the “back to business as usual” scenario, it is a step in the right direction as the country tries to revive an ailing economy.
Axiz resumed operations on May 4, 2020 under Level 4 with warehousing, collections and deliveries have returned to unrestricted service but with limited employees.
Craig Brunsden, CEO, Axiz, said the current difficulty for IT channel companies and, more specifically, distributors like Axiz is that it has to limit and protect staff within the confines of the law and implement its own polices on virus safety.
Brunsden said during this period, Axiz has reduced operational staff coping with the backlogs wit experienced, as well as new business. “Goods receiving, warehousing, collections and deliveries have return to unrestricted service, but with limited people. Our sales teams and other office workers will continue to work from home,” he said.
He explained that the company returned to full product availability from May , 4, 2020. “All ICT hardware, software and services as per the new regulations published on April, 29 2020 are available. We expect our full product range to be available, but it will take a few weeks for cargo stuck in the supply chains to arrive from the various vendors as airline capacity becomes available,” he added.
Brunsden said the single biggest thing the company is doing is behind the scenes with the AxizDigital cloud platform. “We will launch our market place which will extend product availability from cloud to include hardware products. We are very excited about this and the development team has done a great job remotely,” he said. “We will continue to support essential services orders as we have done during lockdown, but now under Level 4 we can supply the full range.”
He pointed out that reseller payments are being deferred on a case by case basis where Axiz has relief from vendors. “A few global vendors have announced distributor and channel partner payment extensions,” he noted. “At the moment, it’s so difficult to predict anything other than extremely tough times ahead for all of us. Our short-term outlook is that the demand is there to support the work from home needs and essential technology deployments of our customers.”
According to Brunsden, the longer-term view is increasingly worse as the economic devastation the lockdown has triggered is felt throughout the economy. “SAA and Edcon are just two examples of major employers in dire straits and this has to be felt in the IT industry too – at the very least in a lack of general demand,” he said. “The performance of the rand against the dollar will push prices up by 20% compared to pre-lockdown prices and we’ve never dealt with a price jolt that big before.”
On the bright side, Brunsden was upbeat that the sentiment within the channel is to preserve jobs at the expense of short-term profit and perhaps companies will use this as a time to turn to technology and accelerate plans to digitally transform.