Dealer Spotlight | Tekaef
Office
partners Becoming a real partner to its customers is what it’s all about for Austrian operator Tekaef and contractual services like MPS are very much part of the plan
by Heike Dieckmann heike.dieckmann@opi.net
IT’S
been a busy year for Tekaef. New warehouse, new company name and, to top it all off, the Austrian operator most recently joined EOSA, fuelling hope there’s life left in the reseller alliance that’s been worryingly quiet over the past 18 months or so. At €80 million ($108 million) in revenues, Tekaef Holding is a very sizeable organisation, but it’s also one with several strings to its bow and not all of them are related to OP. With a consultancy business focused on asset management based in Switzerland (Office Asset Consulting), a non OP-related wholesale business (Mape Distribution) and promotional products firm Media Group just making up €10 million of this total, however, it’s firmly rooted in OP or, perhaps more accurately, in the resale and distribution of printer and printer supplies. And that’s Gerhard Panwinkler indeed
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OPI Magazine | November 2013
how the company started out, says Gerhard Panwinkler, Distribution Manager of Printberry, the distribution business of Tekaef Holding. “We began as a reseller of printer and printer supplies – on a telesales basis – in 1994. About ten years ago, we added office supplies to our B2B offering. “Part of our initial portfolio included having supplies distribution contracts with companies like Lexmark, OKI and Brother, for example. Then, about seven years ago, OKI approached us and asked if we wanted to also do the distribution of hardware, ie printers, for them. At the same time, however, OKI felt that we had to split
Angel assumed the name of Tekaef Büroleben (translated as ‘office life’). As mentioned before, Panwinkler heads the distribution business, but he has, in fact, been with the company since its inception. He works closely with company owner Christian Maass and Managing Director Daniel Rossgatterer and is a key part of the firm’s strategy team.
Bigger capacity In addition to the name change, Tekaef also added a second large warehouse at the beginning of the year, in preference over a number of several smaller facilities that proved to be ineffective. Now everything to do with Tekaef Büroleben, now
“We are moving from shifting boxes and selling products to contract management. This is the business of the future” the company so as not to confuse B2B customers with end-users and their distribution contracts. It was a sensible thing to do, so we divided the company into Tekaef Distribution and Logistics and – the B2B reselling part – Tekaef Data Hero and Office Angel.” These two names are now redundant since the firm completely rebranded earlier this year. Since April, Tekaef Distribution and Logistics is known as Printberry, while Tekaef Data Hero and Office
a pure B2B online shop, is stocked at its HQ-based warehouse in Ried (see picture above), while the new Printberry warehouse is located 5km down the road in Hohenzell. This holds all the bulkier items and hardware like monitors, printers, but no office supplies. Partly as a result of that but also due to a different stock rotation, it’s the bigger of the two facilities at 5,000 sq m (the Ried facility has a capacity of 3,000 sq m). That said, Tekaef Büroleben is, weighted in revenues, the larger part