01732 759725 Paul Burn, Managing Director of Nimans, talks to Technology Reseller about the distributor’s first 40 years, the secret of its longevity and the changing nature of distribution Nimans is still Nimans “The reason we’ve been around for 40 years is our diversity, and we try to help our customers achieve the same level of diversity so they don’t get penned into a single market that can leave them exposed. Just look what happened to the phone system market in COVID. It was basically decimated,” he says. “If you’d told me in 2019 that in 2025 Samsung wouldn’t be doing phone systems, Panasonic wouldn’t be doing phone systems, NEC wouldn’t be doing phone systems, I’d have said you were insane. But that’s what’s happened. As a result, in the last couple of years, we have seen some niche distributors in that area have difficulties, people like Trust. It’s a shame there isn’t the space for those small distribution businesses that there used to be.” When pressed on the changes he has seen in distribution over the last 40 years, Burn highlights the decline of specialist, niche distributors as one of the biggest developments. “There used to be more segmentation in the industry, with different lanes for comms distributors, AV distributors, security distributors, specialist distributors and broadline distributors, but over time, everything’s melded together. If I look at who my competitors were 10 years ago, there was a much wider spread. Now, everyone’s dipping into everybody else’s market. “It’s difficult to offer only the one thing. If you’re offering a cloud telephony solution, but you’re not offering minutes and all the associated networking equipment and the handsets, or if you’re only providing the headset or only doing video conferencing, but not the screens, all you’re doing is encouraging that customer to have a look around and say ‘Is there a single place I can get this from rather than having to buy it from 10 different places?’. It’s definitely more difficult to be niche these days.” Burns adds that diversity might not give the explosive growth that being a specialist in a single technology can but points out that involvement in multiple sectors can protect you from dips in the market and provide more consistent, reliable growth. years later there’s not much left of what was originally there. That’s not how Midwich operates. We are Nimans, we are still here, still in the same premises, still with the same staff, still with the reputation that we’ve spent 40 years building up, albeit with greater global reach and scale. We’re dancing that tightrope between being part of a big, super-company and being that day-to-day, friendly business we’ve always been,” explains Burn. “One of the best barometers of this is how many of our customers know we’re owned by Midwich. I would say it’s probably not that many, because from their perspective all they see is Nimans continuing to be Nimans.” Well, that and access to an expanded product offering that now includes AV solutions, in addition to security products and Nimans’ core networking, telephony and collaboration portfolio that provides a straight line back through multiple technology evolutions to the distributor’s origins in the liberalisation of the UK comms market in the 1980s. Burn cites Nimans’ ability to diversify into new markets as one of the keys to its longevity, from two-way radios (a passion of founder Julian Nimans) and fax machines in its earliest days to telephone systems and mobile comms to more recent innovations such as video and unified communications, and latterly the new product areas of security solutions and AV. This year is Nimans’ 40th anniversary. The leading technology distributor founded by Julian Nimans in 1985 was acquired by Midwich in 2022 but is still run as a separate entity. As Managing Director Paul Burn says, Nimans is still Nimans, even if it is part of a bigger group. “Sometimes, when businesses get bought, they get swallowed up and five 08 INTERVIEW continued... Paul Burn
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