Stampede Presentations Products announced that it is expanding the credit facilities it offers to qualified dealers and investing millions of additional dollars in deepening its product inventory to be in a stronger position to meet dealer demands for faster order shipments.
“Our dealers have made it very clear to us that they see 2012 as a very strong year for them if they can obtain the credit they need and the product they need to complete their customer installations in a timely way,” said Kevin Kelly, Stampede’s president and COO. “Stampede is in a very strong financial position to meet both of these needs and we intend to do so by expanding the credit we offer to qualified dealers and increasing the inventory we carry on critically important core products, such as displays, projectors, and video conferencing equipment.”
During 2011, Stampede extended over $55 million monthly in credit lines to its dealers. Stampede says that it is committed to increasing its financial support to dealers in the two areas that matter most to them — credit and inventory.
“You have to remember that last year Stampede experienced a 51 percent growth in unit sales in core categories and a 48-percent increase in operating profit, constituting the most successful year in our 15-year history,” Kelly said. “In fact, Stampede now represents more than 120 different manufacturers, with 35 new lines added just in the last two years, to support our 9,000-plus dealer partners.”
“If you think back to when the financial crisis really started in 2008, credit lines were being closed down almost overnight,” said Stampede chief executive officer, Mark Wilkins. “Stampede throughout this entire time provided stable and growing credit to the professional AV marketplace. We circled the wagons and, with our financial advisors, we decided that this can’t go on forever.”
“We’ve invested millions of dollars in financing and in additional inventory, to be able to provide that value to those manufacturer partners, and to be able to have that product on hand and available for immediate shipment to our dealers. At the end of the day we are enabling dealers to do a job that they may not have been able to do themselves without the value-adds that we provide. It could be a situation where they didn’t have access to a certain category of products. It could be a situation where they didn’t have access to certain credit facilities that would enable them to do a larger job. We are stepping in an filling in the gaps wherever they exist.”
