These 10 Channel Stocks Point to Optimism for Partners

Large swaths of the American workforce enter Thanksgiving feeling economic headwinds of all kinds, but do channel businesses and their investors feel similarly?

Stockholders across the board have been averting their eyes from red font on their investment portfolios in recent months. The NASDAQ Composite Index fell to its lowest of the year on Nov. 3 at 10,343, its lowest since the summer of 2020. The S&P Dow Jones Indices declared the S&P 500 a bear market on June 13. That hadn’t occurred since March 2020 when the you-know-what kicked off in full-force.

Peter Radizeski, president of Rad-Info, said many public companies have been lowering their guidance in the last two quarters and attributing the change to “macro environment” trends, including exchange rates, inflation and the war in Ukraine war. Many of them have conceded publicly that their enterprise deals will take longer to close as a result, Radizeski said.

Rad-Info’s Peter Radizeski

And technology companies have not been spared.

The NASDAQ-100 Technology Sector Index peaked at 9,840 on Nov. 18, 2021. It has gradually fallen since then. The index made some gains in the summer before plummeting in August and then again in September and October, hitting 5,350 on Oct. 14. Now the Nasdaq’s tech index stands at 6,072, an improvement from a month ago but still a paltry comparison where it stood earlier this year.

The index includes popular consumer brands like Apple, Match Group and Meta, as well as giants in enterprise technology like Microsoft, Zoom and Palo Alto.

At the same time, layoffs are hitting the tech sector hard, with HP, Intel and other big names announcing bloodletting. Layoffs have hit the telecom sector in addition to the IT sector, with RingCentral shedding 10% of its workforce. Moreover, one of the largest carriers that transacts through agents has cut part of its enterprise sales team, sources tell Channel Futures.

The Partner Impact

But those are vendors that sell through the channel. How are the actual channel partners faring? Partners have been suffering through economic challenges all year long, the foremost being that damn supply chain.

Channel Futures analyzed a list of 10 publicly traded channel partners to see how their stocks have been performing. The list attempts to include all types of channel partners including VAR-MSP hybrids, ISVs, distributors and systems integrators. We’ve also got a research firm that dabbles in the agent space as well as technology services distributor Intelisys, which has helped propel its parent company ScanSource into the agent space.

An exploration of these businesses and their stocks shows that investors haven’t lost confidence in the channel. Channel partners saw their share prices suffer in the fall, but most have rebounded and are working their way back up to the high points they enjoyed in late 2021 and early 2022. A further analysis of their earnings reports indicates that executives still see strong demand from their customers for their technology sourcing and services.

Scroll through the 10 images above to learn about how these channel companies have been faring on the stock market.

 Allison Francis contributed to this report.