Ingram Micro's worldwide sales were an all-time record US$11.8 billion, up 4 percent, when compared with $11.4 billion in the fourth quarter last year, as announced by the wholesale technology distributor over the weekend.

Worldwide gross profit was $710 million (6.00 percent of total sales), compared with $661 million (5.81 percent of total sales) in the 2012 fourth quarter.

"The fourth quarter marked a strong close to a year where we executed well on our key strategic and financial objectives," says Alain Monie, CEO, Ingram Micro.

"We successfully balanced revenue growth with margin and earnings improvement and drove solid operating leverage across the business.

"The end result of our focus and steady course is evident in our fourth quarter and full year results, which demonstrate excellent progress along the trajectory towards our 2015 financial targets and helped us deliver strong shareholder value for the year."

Operating income was $173 million (1.46 percent of total sales), compared with 2012 fourth quarter operating income of $168 million (1.48 percent of total sales) while 2013 fourth quarter net income was $112 million, or 71 cents per diluted share. This compares with 2012 fourth quarter net income of $101 million, or 66 cents per diluted share.

Key 2013 fourth quarter business highlights:

The company's mobility business was accretive to 2013 fourth quarter non-GAAP earnings per diluted share by 11 cents, bringing the total accretion from the mobility business for the 2013 full year to 35 cents, above the company's target of 34 cents that was initially established upon announcement of the acquisition of BrightPoint in July 2012.

Ingram Micro Mobility added new OEM distribution agreements in Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America and won new logistics contracts in all regions.

Australia achieved the company's target for non-GAAP operating profitability in the 2013 fourth quarter, improving more than $12 million from the operating loss in last year's fourth quarter.

The company added global enterprise IT asset disposition, onsite data destruction and e-waste recycling services for large enterprise customers, retail customers and OEMs, increasing its supply chain capabilities and solutions offerings with the acquisition of CloudBlue Technologies, Inc.

Ingram Micro also expanded its capabilities in the eCommerce logistics market with the acquisition of Shipwire, Inc., enhancing its ability to accelerate growth in the rapidly expanding eCommerce fulfillment industry, while also better enabling Ingram Micro Logistics (IML) to meet the eCommerce needs of large retailers with significantly reduced onboarding time, cost and complexity.

"Our company is proactively accompanying great changes in the technology industry and evolving its business composition and structure accordingly," Monie adds."As we explore and execute on our various initiatives for growth and stronger profitability, the overall objective of our organisational effectiveness programs – which we have been working at developing over the past few months – is to streamline and focus our resources to run our businesses faster, smarter and better to capture the tremendous opportunities we have already started to invest in, while generating greater, sustainable shareholder value."

Outlook

For the 2014 year, the company currently expects worldwide revenue to grow in the low- to mid-single-digits, in-line with overall global IT spending.

The company also expects to drive solid non-GAAP operating leverage in 2014, as additional investments into the business are more than offset by continued execution, operational improvement and benefits from earlier investments, as well as the favourable impact in the second half of 2014 from the company's organisational effectiveness programs.

For the 2014 first quarter, the company currently expects a low double-digit sequential decline in worldwide revenue and a high-teen basis point sequential decline in gross margin, both in-line with recent historical seasonality.

The company also said that it is continuing its organic investments, which also now include investments into recently acquired businesses to leverage Ingram Micro's global reach. Diluted weighted average shares outstanding for the 2014 first quarter are expected to be 158.5 million.