COVID-19 Hits NAS Channel Sales but Germany Bucks Europe-Wide Trend


COVID-19 Hits NAS Channel Sales but Germany Bucks Europe-Wide Trend

COVID-19 Hits NAS Channel Sales but Germany Bucks Europe-Wide Trend

COVID-19 Hits NAS Channel Sales but Germany Bucks Europe-Wide Trend


Given the closure of most businesses across Europe over recent months, it's perhaps not surprising that many channel IT categories have slumped. The market for Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices has been no different, with revenue growth declining by nearly 12.2% year-on-year in the first 22 weeks of the year.

However, Germany showed the way forward with double-digit growth by the end of May, according to the latest data from CONTEXT, the IT market intelligence company.

Ups and downs

Overall, NAS revenue sales took a dive in four of Europe's top five markets: France (-11.1%) the UK, (-15%), Italy (-23.1%) and Spain (38.8%). This is understandable given the closure of enterprise offices during much of the period, and the increasing competition in the consumer space from cloud-based storage offerings. However, Germany bucked the trend with significant revenue growth of 15.7%, amounting to an additional 𔚼.4m in channel sales.

Most of this growth came from Synology (6%) which has the lion's share of the market (73%). Buffalo just managed positive growth of 1% for the period, while QNAP (-2%) and Western Digital (-4%) both fared poorly. With Buffalo hard on its heels, there's an argument for saying QNAP should be trying to increase its presence in markets showing growth potential. It has been traditionally the dominant player in Italy, but demand there has plummeted.

SMBs spend on 2-bay

Buffalo is gaining share particularly in the German 2-bay NAS market, where Synology's DS200 range displayed strong sales growth of (+33%) year-on-year. The 2-bay sub-category covers entry level devices usually purchased by consumers and SMBs. In fact, small businesses were the only end-user type to experience some growth over the period.

This partly explains why the majority of growth for NAS in Germany has been driven through retail (222.3%) and e-tail consumer (11.4%) channels. It seems as if large domestic retailers like MediaMarkt have taken advantage of Amazon's relative weakness in the German market to build out their online shopping channels. Corporate resellers performed poorly (-4.5%) due to the lockdown-related sharp decline in the enterprise IT market so far this year.

Stay tuned for more business-critical IT channel insight from CONTEXT coming soon.

By JT

 

 

 


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