Reseller Misco has gone into administration, resulting in the loss of 300 jobs in the UK. Its international operation will continue running, but it's unclear whether offshoots in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden will be affected in future.
The company officially announced its demise with a statment noting Geoffrey Rowley, Thomas MacLennan and John Lowe of FRP Advisory LLP have been appointed Joint Administrators of Misco UK Limited on 19th October 2017. The Joint Administrators act as agents of the Company without personal liability.
Rowley explained that the company had made "great progress" since it was sold to Hilco Capital back in March, but it could not simply make substantial enough improvements to continue trading.
"The company’s turnaround plans could not deal sufficiently with the rapidly deterioration in cash-flow after the sudden tightening of credit insurance terms. The UK business had moved to a system of supply chain outsourcing of stock, with increasing levels of automation to enable greater efficiencies with suppliers and distributions and overall lower cost, however these efforts came at a time of heightened competition from other globalised online retailers which have eaten heavily into the margins of even established IT resellers like Misco," Rowely said.
Rowley added that the administrators' main priority was ensuring employees were looked after and would be referring those affected by job losses to the Redundancy Payments Service, assisting applications to ensure they are paid what they are owed.
Previous parent company Systemax decided to sell the failing IT services business, although it decided to keep hold of its VAR business in France, and its MRO business in the US, called IPG.
