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TWST: Would you give us a brief historical sketch of the company and a
picture of the things you are doing at the present time?
Mr. Bell: We founded Bell Micro in 1988 and have grown the company to be
an international distributor and manufacturer of computer and storage
products. We are international in scope, with about 15% of our business
coming from Latin America, and the balance is evenly split between North
America and Europe. We have about 50 locations globally with inside and
outside sales personnel, as well as value-added and light manufacturing
in some of the areas. We are known as the storage specialist within our
industry, and represent companies such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, EMC,
Brocade, Qlogic, Emulex, and similar companies. We are focused on
storage systems. We are the largest distributor of disk drives globally.
About 28% of our businesses is in disk drives. We represent all the
major lines ' Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi, Western Digital, Toshiba, NEC,
Fujitsu, and other companies. So we are very well positioned with
leaders in the industry, and positioned in the right markets. We add a
great deal of value to our customers with our value-added and light
manufacturing. We are the storage specialists. And storage systems are
one of the key growth segments of the IT industry. TWST: What were the circumstances of the founding of the company? What
was your vision at that time?
Mr. Bell: My background is as an engineer in the aerospace business, and
then in general management roles in semiconductor, aerospace, and
distribution companies. I went into distribution in 1980 and ran
Kierulff, a company that was owned by Ducommun. We did a lot of work on
the space shuttle. I ran the distribution business, grew it, and was
President and COO of Ducommun. I saw an opportunity to found Bell
Microproducts and left in 1987. One objective of Bell Micro was to sell
computer products, which we are doing through our value-added reseller
and OEM customers. In addition, we also felt that there was a hole there
and that the Japanese semiconductor companies were not being well
represented, and so we adopted that as one of our specialties. In 1988,
it looked like the Japanese semiconductor companies were going to rule
the world and they did for a while, but that star faded with the
Japanese economy. We still represent some of those companies, but it is
a very small part of our business. The storage part of the business was
something that resonated very, very well with the company. We have
built a $3.2 billion company with 70% of it being related to storage
components and storage systems, and we have since de-emphasized the
classic semiconductor products.
Tickers included in this excerpt: BELM
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The
Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does
not make stock recommendations.
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