Avnet Names New Presidents for its EMEA Components Business

Bringing Avnet’s semiconductor units EBV Elektronik and Avnet Silica close to global decision making.

Avnet Inc. (NYSE: AVT), leading global distributor, announced a major leadership transition for its European organization. Slobodan Puljarevic and Mario Orlandi were named President of Avnet EMEA, succeeding Miguel Fernandez, who retired from Avnet after more than 30 years. In their new roles they will report to Phil Gallagher, President of Avnet’s global components business.

In addition to their new responsibilities, both Puljarevic and Orlandi will continue to manage Avnet’s leading semiconductor distributors, EBV Elektronik (Puljarevic) and Avnet Silica (Orlandi). The change will have no effect on the unique go-to-market model of Avnet in EMEA, also known as Speedboat model. Apart from a few internal reporting lines, no organizational changes are planned.

Phil Gallagher said: “By removing one management layer, we will bring the very successful European business closer to Avnet’s global decision making. Having best practices from both EBV and Avnet Silica available globally will help us to become a better company overall. Both Puli and Mario have been instrumental in establishing the European operations of Avnet and will ensure Avnet EMEA stays successful.”

Since the acquisition of the EBV group back in 2000, Avnet has been building its European business on a model of individual business units with specific focus and entrepreneurial spirit, but based on a strong logistics and infrastructure backbone. All acquisitions in EMEA were integrated into this model by either combining business units or found new ones, along the lines of the technical & product based core competences – semiconductors, IP&E (Interconnect, Passive and Electromechanical components) – or logistics requirements.

Gallagher: “This model has proven to be extremely flexible and resilient and helped us to quickly respond to market or economic challenges. That is why we want to further strengthen it by having two strong ‘Speedboat’ leaders run the region jointly.”