Premier Farnell Acquires Shenzhen Embest Technology Co Ltd, Enhancing Its Offering for Electronic Designers

Premier Farnell plc (LSE:PFL) announces the completion of its acquisition of Shenzhen Embest Technology Co Ltd (Embest), a leading provider of embedded system development boards and tools, as well as design engineering services with gross assets of approximately £0.5 million (at current exchange rates). Embest, which is based in China, will provide solutions to customers of Premier Farnell across the world.

The addition of Embest’s products and services enables Premier Farnell to offer design engineering customers unique, end-to-end solutions that add value at every stage of the design process, improving efficiency and bringing new products to market faster. The move illustrates Premier Farnell’s investment in its proven strategy for profitable growth, becoming a global web and engineering solutions provider, whilst expanding into the growing Chinese market.

Embest has more than 12 years experience in embedded systems design and is a recognized leader of ARM based embedded systems. With over 130 employees, the majority of whom are design engineers, Embest serves 20,000 customers in China. More than 200 universities in China have used Embest’s dedicated educational products to set up embedded systems laboratories. The acquisition will see additional services to the element14 Community and the Knode, element14’s unique online workspace for engineers.

Laurence Bain, Chief Executive Officer of Premier Farnell, said: "This pivotal acquisition demonstrates our substantial commitment to attracting new design engineering customers and taking a bigger market share in the dynamic and rapidly expanding Asian market. Embest has been a strategic partner of ours for a number of years and we share many complimentary relationships with global leaders such as ARM, Freescale, Atmel, TI and NXP. This deal connects our component and board level portfolio with Embest’s expanded offering in systems level solutions, including embedded software, embedded OS and hardware development. We are now in a unique position to offer our global customers complete solutions from concept definition and design start through to prototype. These capabilities are particularly attractive to our supplier partners, who are focused on attracting customers at the start of the design cycle.”

With this new capability, Premier Farnell has already secured a number of significant strategic partnerships with key suppliers to offer development platforms and solutions.

David Shen, Group Chief Technology Officer of Premier Farnell, added: "Premier Farnell’s success is built on understanding what engineers need and evolving our offering to meet this need with great products, fast delivery and unique solutions for every stage of the design process. This acquisition further enhances our strategy of becoming an engineering solutions provider to design engineers. Additionally, this is also an exciting development for our supplier partners globally, as a signal of our evolution from a value-adding high service distributor to a global design solutions partner.”

Mr. Liu Chi, President of Embest commented: "We have worked with Premier Farnell for some time, providing development kits, tools, software and PCB services. We have watched the company very successfully move away from being purely a component distributor to a web-based solutions company and Embest’s expertise and experience will help them continue this trend.”

The acquisition also gives Premier Farnell access to Embest’s CooCox open source, web-based, Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for ARM based designs that is already used globally by 1000’s of design engineers. Embest will also continue to act as an authorized distributor of ARM/Keil Series Development Tools, Parasoft Testing Tools, CadSoft Eagle design software and HP Series Management Solutions.

The integration of CooCox IDE into the Knode will enable design engineers to leverage the Knode as a one-stop solutions resource centre for all their component, and now systems, design requirements. Additionally, by bringing the CooCox engineering community and our element14 Community together we will create a powerful, global social media platform for design engineers.

For more detail about Embest please visit http://www.embedinfo.com/

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About Premier Farnell

Premier Farnell plc (LSE:PFL) is a global leader in high service distribution of technology products and solutions for electronic system design, maintenance and repair. Its differentiated proposition includes 29 local language transactional websites, and the critically important element14 Community for design engineers – an industry first (www.element14.com). With sales last year of £973.1m and underlying profits of £104.6m the Group distributes its comprehensive portfolio of products and services throughout Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, supported by a global supply chain and an inventory profile developed to anticipate and meet its customers’ needs.

While global in scope, Premier Farnell recognises the individual needs of each market and has continued to internationalise its model accordingly. It trades locally as Farnell element14 in Europe, Newark element14 in North America and Farnell Newark in Brazil. Across Asia Pacific the business trades as element14.

Key facts

Operations in 35 different countries

4,100 employees

Over 2 million customer contacts in 156 industries

Over 400,000 products stocked with access to over four million more on demand

Global leader in legislation RoHS, WEEE, REACH

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