Network1

**The line card is worth reading as a document in itself**, because it is a snapshot of what a Latin American enterprise buyer could actually get in the mid-2010s: Avaya, Axis, Check Point, Dell, Extreme, F5, HP, Juniper, Polycom, Microsoft, Riverbed, Schneider Electric. Several of those have their own entries on this timeline, and several no longer trade under those names - which is what any distributor's catalogue looks like a decade on.

It also ran an authorised training centre, which is the part of value-added distribution most explanations skip. A distributor carrying sixty vendors has resellers who need certifying on products they began selling last quarter, and the vendors' own courses are neither frequent enough nor local enough to cover it.

**The acquisition has a detail worth the whole entry.** ScanSource announced the purchase on 15 August 2014 and completed it in January 2015, for **R$156,928,000** plus payments tied to EBITA over the following four years - and it bought Network1 **through CDC Brasil**, the Brazilian distributor ScanSource had itself acquired in 2011. One acquisition was the vehicle for the next. The American company's Latin American business was not built; it was bought twice, and the second purchase was made by the first.

It was the largest acquisition ScanSource had made to that point. Reported 2014 net sales differ depending on the basis: about **R$720M (US$306M)** on a US-GAAP-adjusted footing in the legal advisers' account, and about **R$850M (US$374M)** in the Portuguese-language release. Both are recorded here; the gap is the adjustment, not a disagreement about the business.

The geography is the practical part. The deal added units in **Goiás, Pernambuco and Espírito Santo** to ScanSource's existing Brazilian presence in São Paulo and Paraná - which is how a distributor actually grows, since serving a reseller in Recife from São Paulo is a different proposition from serving one down the road. Rafael Paloni, Network1's chief executive, went on to run ScanSource's Latin American communications business.

**So the loop closes.** ScanSource appears on this timeline as a specialist distributor from Greenville, South Carolina, whose founding thesis was catching products on their way to becoming commodities. Anyone working for ScanSource in Brazil after 2015 was working inside what had been Network1, under a brand that read Network1-ScanSource for years.