Company history, the early years

Kestronics Ltd. was founded in May 1983 to become the UK Agent/Distributor for Rohm Electronics of Japan, handling the UK and Republic of Ireland markets. Our involvement in both passive and active electronic components from this prestigious manufacturer soon gave us a significant place in the market. To provide a more extensive service to our customers, we rapidly added product ranges from other well known and respected component manufacturers.

In 1996 we acquired the electronic components distributor, Newsham Components Ltd. based near Preston in Lancashire. This subsidiary company operated within the Kestronics Group, having access to full range of products.

As a part of its expansion plans, the company's success with the Rohm thermal printhead range was used as a catalyst to move into the equipment market. Products linked to thermal printing technology were quickly followed by magnetic/chip card readers and hand held computers for mobile data processing applications. This very successful activity led to the creation of a new sales division, separate in all respects from the electronics component division.

Company restructure in 2003

From around year 2000, the market for electronics components started to become difficult due to the tendency for UK manufacturing companies, both large and medium sized, to relocate their printed circuit board assembly activities into their overseas facilities or to use third party sub-contractors, often also located overseas.

The large component distribution companies, needing to replace significant lost business, started to work aggressively in the part of the market traditionally served by medium sized distributors such as Kestronics and Newsham.

In year 2002, the opportunity arose for Kestronics to sell the electronic component distribution division to another UK based distributor which was looking to expand its customer and supplier base. The deal, which included the Newsham Components Ltd subsidiary, was completed on September 30th 2003.

Kestronics today

The sales of the electronics component distribution activity enabled the company to focus on the growing equipment markets and today we have a wide range of equipment and components allowing us to be very strong in many vertical markets, for example, Cash in Transit, Field Service, Inventory Control, Information Kiosks and Retail applications.

We support the sale and distribution of products, where relevant, with software development/support, hardware maintenance and consumables. We have a well-equipped maintenance department where we repair and maintain not only the equipment we have supplied but also certain third party products.

Products are also sold into the East and West European markets and for some overseas suppliers, we act as their European Partner and have an increasing number of sub-distributors in many countries.

Our sales policy is to provide not only good quality products at competitive prices but also to give our customers a high level of technical and commercial support. The comments we receive show that we are valued as a supplier and we like to bring our own suppliers into these relationships to create a three-way partnership.

We seek to work with our customers at the early stage of their product development, not only to ensure that the most suitable product is designed in, but also to give us the opportunity to offer a wider package of products which, in turn, helps them to rationalize their supplier base.

In general, we supply products through our own warehouse and administration system. Case by case we work with very high volume/low price applications as an agent when needed to win business.