The decline in sales through distribution, which lasted nearly a year, is over. Business and consumer technology product sales from Europe's leading distributors rose 2% to €2.7bn ($3.7bn) in January 2010 compared to the same period one year ago, according to data just released by IT market research specialist Context, reversing eleven consecutive months of negative growth.

"The main thing for me was if you look at the distributors sales for the last year, eleven straight months of declining revenues, the reason that January is good news is that for the first time after eleven months, computers have gone onto a growth track," Jeremy Davies, Context co-founder tells IT Europa. "Now sales have been improving over the past few months, but they were still negative in terms of the previous year. So this is the good news, after the decline, we've finally got growth, even if that's slightly small, but it's moving in the other way now."

And the UK is a surprise success: leading the recovery in distributor sales were Europe's top economies, with the UK taking the lead by showing 5.4% growth in revenues recorded in January 2010 compared to the same period one year ago. Sales in Germany grew 4.0%, France 3.3% and Italy 3.1%. The worst performing regions were the Nordics and Austria, with sales down in January 3.5% and 4.4% respectively. "The UK was surprising, because everybody held the UK as being a bit of a basket case," he says.

What seems to have happened with the Nordics is that the HP business was down. "Something happened with the HP business, I'm not sure what it was, it's that whole industry sector computers which for the Nordics was down. So a proportion of that was because HP was pretty dominant. There was a drop off of sales from HP and mainly from the notebooks' side, " he confirmed. HP business, was what really did it - business was down 14.7% in revenues in January. "That was huge; that dragged the whole thing down, HP having such a dominant position, about 46% market share."

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