It’s been more than six months since Synnex Canada announced plans to purchase distribution rival Supercom Canada in a $36.5 million deal, and Synnex Canada chief Mitchell Martin says the deal has proven to be a good one.

The deal, announced in March, completed in April and integrated in May, is already resulting in monthly sales total larger than last year’s numbers for Synnex Canada and Supercom Canada combined, Martin reported.

“Having one plus one become greater than two is pretty rare, especially when the business segments we focused on were common,” Martin said.

In particular, the distributor has done a good job of getting product lines that were previously Synnex-only going to solution providers who were primarily Supercom customers – in fact, with Supercom’s top 20 vendor list, the combined distributor is seeing 20 percent growth. The remaining challenge is growing the business by the same amount going the other way. Martin said “there’s still work to be done” when it comes to maximizing the business of vendors new to Synnex.

“We’ve picked up what Frank had, but we can still develop synergies for vendors new to us,” Martin said.

The distributor has kept all three of its Toronto-area facilities, including its western Toronto headquarters, the former offices of Supercom in Markham, and its facility in Guelph. At the time of the acquisition, Martin said he felt it was important to maintain the presence in Markham to cater to Supercom’s traditional strong spot with solution providers and system builders in that area. Elsewhere across Canada, operations have been consolidated. Synnex staff moved into Supercom’s office in Vancouver, and Supercom staff moved into Synnex’s facility in Montreal.

At the time the deal was announced, Martin said he felt acquiring Supercom “makes us one of the largest distributors in Canada.” Qualifying the exact size of the three broadline distributors in this country is difficult, as none of the three completely break out Canadian results from North America-wide numbers. But Martin said, based on market intelligence, he believes “we’re in the same general area in terms of total sales” with rivals Ingram Micro Canada and Tech Data Canada.