MicroWarehouse
| Part of Dixons Retail plc | |
| Headquarters | Hemel Hempstead, United Kingdom |
|
Key people
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Keith Jones (Managing Director, PC World since April 2005), Jerry Roest (Managing Director, PC World Business since 2006) Simon Turner (Group Managing Director, Computing and Communications since April 2004) |
| Products | IT |
| Revenue | n/a (see Dixons Retail plc for group revenue.) |
MicroWarehouse is one of the UK's largest and longest established direct resellers of branded IT products and services to business. At the height of their industry dominance Micro Warehouse had 3500 employees in 13 different countries. By 2000 Micro Warehouse was the leading direct marketer and catalog retailer of personal computer products with worldwide sales of $2.6 billion. MicroWarehouse owns and operates the domain names Inmac.co.uk, MacWarehouse.co.uk and MicroWarehouse.co.uk. All three are on-line, web-based, computer hardware and software retailers.
The company was originally co-founded by Peter Godfrey, Felix Dennis and Bob Bartner in 1987, and was based in South Norwalk, Connecticut. After an Initial Public Offering on December 10, 1992, the company paved the way for a variety of competitors. In the 1990s Micro Warehouse acquired a large number of similar companies in Europe. Companies were acquired in the UK, France, The Netherlands, Sweden and Finland. Inmac was also purchased, raising European sales to over $700 million. After growing to become the fifth largest catalog company in the world and a dominant reseller for Apple, Microsoft, and many other hardware manufacturers and software publishers, a class-action lawsuit distracted senior management for several years.
Jerry York, CFO who led turnarounds at IBM and Chrysler, was the Chairman, President, and CEO. The Los Angeles buyout firm Freeman, Spogli, York, and a group of private investors including Michael Ovitz and Gary L. Wilson, spent $725 million to take Micro Warehouse private in February, 2000. The leveraged buyout left the company burdened with $200 million in debt. The company sold its North American operations to CDW Corporation just two and a half years later, on September 8, 2003 for $22 million. Micro Warehouse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and York announced his resignation. The bankrupt company owed millions to its unsecured creditors. $17.9 million to Ingram Micro, $8.6 million to Hewlett-Packard, $3.1 million to Toshiba, and $2 million to IBM.
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