32 01732 759725 innovation to happen within the company – it’s very important, with AI, that we allow that more and more. Our retention rates are really high; our Glint survey, an internal survey of how people feel about working here, is at record highs; and our gender pay gap is really low, much lower than our top 10 vendors and our top 10 customers, for example. Culturally, we work really hard, and we’re seeing a payoff from that. You’ve got to have the right strategy, but if you have that and then cultivate the right culture and the right empowerment you will stand out. That’s a real differentiator for us versus a lot of businesses, full stop, and certainly versus our competitors. TR: Do you have examples of some of the innovation that has been generated internally through this culture? DW: If I think about it at an operations level, we’ve enabled AI to be deployed through our own tool set. Why through our own tool set? Because you really want to lock down your data, you want to get all the privacy stuff right and you don’t want everybody doing everything all the time just because they think it’s a good idea. We look for ideas, we assess them, we support them, and then we certify them. People have taken 10-year old problems within our business, which may be around how we provide something simple but absolutely necessary like a very detailed config backlog report, and written agents, supported by us, that in no time do what used to take hours every week – and with no inaccuracies. A bigger example might be how we drive messaging into our customers through Pace, our lifecycle-led approach to engaging partners in the right way, at the right time, based on where they are in their journey. A lot of that capability has been generated by innovation at a country-level. People in the centre observe how different countries are working and then they take that, improve it and drive it out into the company. It’s not top-down; it’s not consultants coming in; we’re not buying a product. It’s innovation within the business that we capitalise on and then industrialise. Technology Reseller (TR): TD SYNNEX recently announced its results for 2025. Are these representative of its performance in the UK and Ireland as well? David Watts (DW): It was a very strong year across all geographies, and that is being driven by our growth strategy and the investments we’ve made. That strategy’s paying off, but we always say that with humility because the IT market is very competitive and is moving incredibly fast, about as fast as I’ve experienced it, and in all sorts of ways. Our UK&I results reflect global results in the sense that we grew across all our technology groups and our profit grew nicely in line with our top line. In the UK&I, gross billings were up circa 17% and we grew our market share by about 2.5%. One area that really stood out for us is the endpoint solutions business – PC, peripheral supplies, print – which saw really strong double-digit growth, beyond the 17% figure for the overall company, with PC making up the vast majority of the volume. That endpoint solutions market is still not massively strong by the way; we still have months and quarters when it goes backwards, but with PC we had a really good run, as did the market, around Windows 11. Strategically, we also took some stronger positions around stock and some of the larger accounts and grew market share there. Critically, because it’s the core of our business, we also grew market share through SMB on endpoint solutions. SMB is a big focus of ours, because 99% of our customer base by quantity is an SMB. Reach and breadth is a core company strategy, and we grew nicely in line with that. TR: What was your market share in 2025 and how does that compare to previous years? DW: As an aggregate, it was circa 25-26%, according to Context. Historically, we’ve been a little bit below 25%. Over the last year and a half, we’ve been number one distributor every month and in many of those months we were growing when the market without us was not growing. Some of our competitors, no doubt, had a good year, but some of them definitely didn’t. TR: Why do you think you had such a good year? DW: Two strands we’re focused on corporately are firstly our strategic imperatives in terms of where we’re investing and where we’re focusing – that strategy is well understood and well invested in. We also continue to drive our culture very strongly. A lot of companies say that, but that really did happen under our old CEO Rich Hume and it is certainly happening under Patrick Zammit, our CEO of the last two years, and it is certainly happening under me and the board in the UK&I. We are 100% focused on our values and on developing our people, and we feel that last year we really saw a payoff for driving that culture really hard, empowering people as close to the vendor and the customer as possible and allowing Technology Reseller talks to David Watts about the distributor and technology aggregator’s 2025 performance and outlook for 2026 Q&A David Watts Q&A With David Watts, Managing Director of TD SYNNEX UK&I
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