Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Insight Enterprises third quarter 2020 operating results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session, and instructions will follow at that time. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your touch-tone telephone. I would now like to hand the call over to your speaker for today, Ms. Glynis Bryan. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Thank you, Deborah. Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining the Insight Enterprises earnings conference call. Today, we will be discussing the company's operating results for the quarter ended September 30th, 2020. I'm Glynis Bryan, Chief Financial Officer of Insight, and joining me today is Ken Lamneck, President and Chief Executive Officer. If you do not have a copy of the earnings release that was posted this morning and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Form 8-K, you will find it on our website at insight.com under our Investor Relations section. Today's call, including the question and answer period, is being webcast live and can be accessed via the Investor Relations page of our website at insight.com. An archived copy of the conference call will be available approximately two hours after completion of the call and will remain on our website for a limited time.
This conference call and the associated webcast contain time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of today, November 3rd, 2020. This call is the property of Insight Enterprises, and any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the express written consent of Insight Enterprises is strictly prohibited. In today's conference call, we will refer to non-GAAP financial measures as we discuss third quarter 2020 financial results. When referring to non-GAAP measures in today's call, we will refer to adjusted earnings from operations, adjusted diluted earnings per share, and adjusted return on invested capital. You will find a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to our actual GAAP results included in the press release and the accompanying slide presentation issued earlier today. Also, please note that although it's highlighted as constant currency, all amounts and growth rates discussed are in U.S. dollar terms.
Finally, let me remind you of our forward-looking statements that will be made on today's call. All forward-looking statements that are made during this conference call are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially. These risks are discussed in today's press release and in greater detail in our most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and periodic reports subsequently filed with the SEC. With that, I will now turn the call over to Ken, and if you're following along with the slide presentation, we will begin on slide four. Ken?
Hello everyone, thank you for joining us today to discuss our third quarter 2020 operating results. I'm pleased to report that because of our dedicated team, resilient business model, and the PCM acquisition, we delivered another quarter of double-digit adjusted earnings from operations growth year-over-year in the third quarter. The demand environment continued to be challenged, we focused on answering our clients' most pressing IT needs while helping many to plan for investments needed to support the businesses as the economy recovers. During the third quarter, we drove double-digit growth in services and cloud solutions, which improved gross margins to a new third-quarter record. When combined with the positive effect of the acceleration of our PCM integration, helped us achieve adjusted earnings from operations growth of more than 20% year-over-year. Turning to the third quarter results on slide five.
Consolidated net sales in the third quarter were $1.94 billion, up 1% year-over-year, reflecting two additional months of PCM and the results in this year since the acquisition closed on August 30th, 2019, and lower sales in EMEA and APAC. We focused on growing our services and solution business mix, which helped drive gross margins up 150 basis points year- over- year to 15.9% in the third quarter. Adjusted diluted earnings per share was $1.38, up 25% year-over-year, and on a GAAP basis, diluted earnings per share was $1.10, up 45% year-over-year. Within these results, gross profit generated from cloud solutions was 18% of our consolidated gross profit over the past 12 months.
Finally, our business has generated $462 million in cash flow from operations in the first nine months of 2020, reflecting certain payment timing differences with partners and the benefits of our disciplined cash management practices. Turning to slide six. During the second quarter, we completed the onboarding of PCM clients to our Insight systems. In the third quarter, we completed the integration of back-office operations and worked to consolidate spend across key categories, including IT maintenance, legal and accounting, and marketing expenses. We began to realize some benefits of our real estate consolidation efforts. As a result, we now expect to exit the year with approximately $60 million-$65 million in annualized run rate cost savings in connection with the PCM integration, which is ahead of our first-year expectations on our previously disclosed total commitment of $70 million over two years.
In the third quarter, we also invested in our sales force, adding key technical talent across our solution areas and additional sales coverage to our geographic footprint. We'll continue to invest in this area in the fourth quarter to ensure we're positioned well to compete in the marketplace in 2021, when we expect the IT market will start to recover. Also on the talent front, I'm pleased to announce that just two weeks ago, Joyce Mullen joined Insight as our new President of the North America business. Joyce spent 21 years of her career at Dell Technologies in a variety of sales, service delivery, and IT solution roles. She brings to Insight a deep understanding of the channel and a history of leadership in delivering technology services and solutions to our clients.
From a demand and product bookings perspective, hardware booking trends in North America improved sequentially in the third quarter, growing double digits, although ending down more than 10% year-over-year. The strong growth in hardware bookings did not fully translate to net sales in the quarter, leading to elevated backlog heading into the fourth quarter. In addition, hardware bookings so far in Q4 are tracking ahead of Q3 trends, which we deem an additional positive data point as we close out 2020. Now on to slide seven. Heading into the fourth quarter with the resurgence of COVID across the globe, many businesses are partially open, and many are still in work-from-home mode for most of their teammates. Moreover, as I just noted, booking trends are improving as clients appear to be focused on positioning the business to compete in a possible economic recovery in 2021.
One example is that our cloud and data center transformation team, which was recently awarded a contract with a school district in Texas to build out its wireless mesh network. Leveraging our design, project management, and implementation capabilities, this county will leverage federal COVID stimulus funding to ensure that students are able to continue their education in an ongoing remote learning environment. In addition, we believe we have gained critical market share in modern data center categories through our investments in new technical and sales talent and our differentiated offerings over the last few years. Our strategic partners are taking notice as we were recently named NetApp's 2020 Cloud Innovation Partner of the Year, in recognition of our leadership in architecting, implementing, and supporting hybrid storage solutions and storage-as-a-service solutions.
In June of this year, Insight was named Dell's Transformational Partner of the Year in recognition of our deep expertise in implementing modern hybrid data center technology as well as robust IoT and edge infrastructures. We also continue to innovate to help clients recover from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, including adding contact tracing capabilities to Insight's connected platform detection prevention solution. This solution, developed by our digital innovation business, helps clients deploy and operate critical sensors, devices, and infrastructure that can detect symptoms that help prevent the spread of the coronavirus through its screening process. This comprehensive IoT solution, which we can deliver globally, is being received well in the marketplace, with recent wins in the pharmaceutical and energy sectors in North America and the mining industry in Australia.
Our focus on strategic IT solution areas has allowed us to prioritize our capital investments to introduce differentiated offerings to our clients and to bring value to our partners across the globe. In addition, we believe our values of hunger, heart, and harmony define our culture and allow us to attract talent to help us compete effectively in our industry. Just last week, our culture was recognized yet again as we were named to the Forbes World's Best Employers 2020 list. Insight ranked 27 among IT companies worldwide and number 296 overall. We believe our strong culture and clear strategy will continue to benefit our business as the market rebounds in the future. I want to thank our teammates across the globe for their commitment to Insight and our clients.
As we close out 2020, we'll have a resilient team, a strong balance sheet, and access to sufficient levels of capital to meet our foreseeable operating requirements during these challenging times. We're confident that our solution area expertise will allow us to support our clients' needs, both in this environment and when the economy eventually rebounds. I'll now hand the call over to Glynis to provide more details on our financial performance. Glynis?
Thank you, Ken. As Ken noted, we are pleased with our global team's execution in the first nine months of 2020. So far this year, the team has successfully integrated the largest acquisition in the company's history and has delivered integration savings well ahead of the planned timeline. In a sluggish demand environment, we focused on selling services and solutions, which helped drive gross margins up more than 100 basis points year-over-year. We reduced our operating costs to meet current demand and accelerated the integration of PCM, which allowed us to drive adjusted earnings from operations growth of 15% year-over-year in the first nine months. To complement our strong earnings growth, our business generated record level cash flow from operations so far this year. As a result, in the third quarter, we paid off the balance outstanding under our ABL facility.
We now have the entire $1.2 billion facility available to fund future growth. We set a high bar for ourselves coming into this year pre-COVID, and while earnings are down versus our original expectations, our significantly stronger cash flow performance allowed us to deliver adjusted return on invested capital of 12%, clearly demonstrating the resilience of our business model and the operational discipline we have instilled across the business. Moving on to slide 10. Exiting the quarter, we are comfortable with our current leverage position of less than 1x debt to cash flows or EBITDA. Under our ABL agreement, our primary compliance covenant is a fixed charge coverage ratio, which includes trailing 12-month EBITDA coverage over capital expenditures, taxes, and cash interest. As of September 30th, we're at four times against the minimum requirement of one times, and we're confident we can support our capital requirements and liquidity needs.
As we highlighted last quarter, our cash cycle is inverted, meaning we pay our partners on shorter terms than we receive from our clients. This allows us to drive more cash flow when sales decline sequentially. We have experienced this dynamic in the first nine months of 2020, which has helped drive our above-seasonal cash flow generation of $462 million year to date. Our cash flow results have also benefited from approximately $100 million in timing differences for partner payments that we expect will clear in the fourth quarter. For the full year, we expect cash flow generation will be in the range of $325 million-$375 million, comfortably exceeding the top end of our previously announced guidance range. In the third quarter, our cash conversion cycle was 25 days, down 17 days year-over-year.
The improvement is due to a better collections experience on our accounts receivable of three days, combined with an increase in DPO of 13 days. The increase in DPO is primarily due to increased use of our inventory financing facility as a result of recent renegotiation of the facility and the payment timing differences I mentioned. Before I report on the financial results, I would like to remind everyone that since the closing of the acquisition in August 2019, the PCM book of business has been integrated into Insight systems. We no longer report results for the acquired PCM business on a standalone basis. Now moving on to North America, starting on slide 11. In North America, net sales were $1.6 billion in the third quarter, up 3% from prior year quarter, driven primarily by PCM.
We saw strong demand with public sector clients, particularly in Chromebook and device categories. We also continue to see strong services sales growth year-over-year at 12%, primarily due to increased adoption of cloud solutions and Insight-delivered services. Gross profit of $247 million in North America was up 13% year-over-year, and gross margin improved 150 basis points to 15.9%, primarily due to an increased mix of cloud and services sales in the business and the addition of PCM. North America selling and administrative expenses, excluding amortization expense, increased 12% year-over-year, primarily due to the PCM acquisition. Adjusted earnings from operations increased 20% year-over-year to $64 million for the quarter. Moving on to EMEA on slide 12. Net sales in the third quarter decreased 8% in constant currency to $341 million.
Year-over-year, hardware sales increased 1%, due primarily to higher volume sales of devices to public sector clients. Software sales decreased 12% and services sales increased 19%. Gross profit in EMEA in the third quarter was $50 million and when combined with tight expense management, resulted in adjusted earnings from operations of $5 million, up 53% from the same period last year, also in constant currency. In APAC, on slide 13, net sales in the third quarter declined 13% in constant currency to $57 million, reflecting lower hardware and software sales as a result of a decreased demand associated with the client's response to COVID. Despite lower top line, gross profit grew 2% year-over-year in constant currency and expenses decreased 3%, which drove adjusted earnings from operations up 19% year-over-year in the third quarter. Moving on to our tax rate.
For the third quarter of 2020, our tax rate was 23.8%, which is lower than our prior year quarter's tax rate of 27.2% due to the rate impact of acquisition-related costs which did not recur in 2020, and the beneficial impact of certain income tax regulations issued during the current quarter. Turning to details of the third quarter cash flow performance on slide 14. Year to date through the third quarter of 2020, our operations generated $462 million of cash compared to $169 million last year. During that time, we invested approximately $21 million in capital expenditures, up from $17 million last year. As we stated last quarter, we expect CapEx for the full year will be between $20 million-$25 million.
We've also invested $6 million to acquire vNext in France in February of this year, and we received $14 million in net proceeds from the sale of one of our buildings earlier in the year. Lastly, we used $25 million to repurchase shares of our common stock in the first quarter. At the end of the quarter, we had a cash balance of $75 million, of which $57 million was resident in our foreign subsidiaries, compared to our prior year balance of $141 million. As I noted earlier, we had total debt of approximately $296 million, all of it in our convertible fixed-rate debt, at the end of the third quarter, and this is down from total debt of $837 million as of the same point last year.
As a reminder, we've taken several actions to preserve our profitability during the downturn while positioning our business to emerge healthy and competitive as market conditions improve. Specifically, on the cost side, we've reduced discretionary spending across the business and have right-sized our operational and delivery platforms to expected volume trends. We've accelerated our existing PCM integration plans around back office, sales, and services, which allows us to realize approximately $55 million in cost savings in our results in 2020 through Q3, and positions us to exit the year with run rate savings between $60 million and $65 million. Heading into 2021, certain of our variable expenses that were not incurred in 2020 due to COVID-related impacts on our financial results, such as sales rep commissions, executive compensation, travel, and certain other discretionary expenses, are expected to be incurred if market conditions improve from current levels.
We currently estimate the benefit from these items in 2020 to be in the range of $30 million-$35 million. In addition, we have made and plan to continue making select strategic investments in sales and technical resources across our solution areas to ensure we optimize our participation as market conditions improve. Our balance sheet is healthy. We have access to capital sufficient to operate in these uncertain economic times, and we believe the steps we have taken will help us emerge in a good position to compete as the economy recovers. I will now turn the call back to Ken for his closing comments.
On to slide 15. We remain committed to our long-term priorities discussed at our Analyst Day last fall, which include continuing to innovate in order to capture share in high growth areas such as the cloud and the intelligent edge, developing and delivering solutions that drive better business outcomes for our clients, expanding the scale of our business and strategic clients and end markets, and lastly, continue to optimize client experience and our execution through relentless focus on operational excellence. For the remainder of 2020, we believe the overall IT market will be challenged given the current COVID crisis and its adverse impact on the global economy.
We have taken appropriate steps to reduce our discretionary spending and ensure we have access to capital to support our short-term operating plans and are confident we will weather this tough economic environment and emerge healthy on the other side.
We currently expect net sales for the fourth quarter will between $2.1 billion and $2.2 billion, and adjusted diluted earnings per share will be between $1.45 and $1.55. For the full year, net sales are expected to be between $8.1 billion and $8.2 billion, and adjusted diluted earnings per share are expected to be between $5.88 and $5.98. Our outlook assumes a tax rate of 25.5% for the fourth quarter. This outlook excludes acquisition-related expenses, severance and restructuring expenses incurred, amortization of intangible assets, and amortization of convertible debt discount and issuance costs during the first nine months of 2020, and those that may be incurred during the balance of 2020.
Due to the inherent difficulty of forecasting all these types of expenses, which impact net earnings and diluted earnings per share, the company is unable to reasonably estimate the impact of such expenses ascending to net earnings and diluted earnings per share. Thank you again for joining us today, and thank you for all our teammates across the globe for their support of the company, our partners, and our clients. Be safe, and we look forward to talking with you again next quarter. That concludes my comments, and we'll now open up your line for your questions.
If you would like to ask questions, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from Adam Tindle with Raymond James.
Okay. Thanks. Good morning. Ken, I just wanted to start on the Q4 guidance, appreciate you providing that. It looks like it's going to imply that revenue is going to be up somewhere around high single digits on a sequential basis, which is pretty nice uptick. Kind of reminds me of prior years where we had larger budget flushes. Maybe you could just touch on how you built those expectations. I know there's been a couple quarters in a row where the press release is citing impact from COVID on internal budgets, to an outsider, that just doesn't seem overly conservative. Would be helpful just to understand how you built up those expectations.
Thanks, Adam. I appreciate that. In regards to the traditional sort of budget flush for Q4, I don't really believe that's in the cards. Now, I think, CFOs are certainly taking over, quite a bit of the control of spending in these environments. I don't believe that companies are looking at budget flush. That's not certainly what we're talking about. When we look at sort of the backlog going into Q4, and we look at just the trending that we're seeing, certainly public sector will have nice growth in Q4 when you look at the federal government, state and local, as well as the education market will certainly grow very nicely. Then we are starting to see some enterprise clients starting to look to spend to get back to more of a normalcy, if you can call it that environment.
All that put together, of course, gives us the confidence of the guidance we've provided for Q4.
Okay. That's helpful. Maybe just as a follow-up on the PCM savings, obviously nice job tracking ahead of where you had expected to be. I think $60 million-$65 million exiting Q4 is up again. I just wanted to ask, why not revise up the total $70 million cumulative target? Is that because you're just kind of getting through the savings faster and the total is unchanged? Or are you finding additional areas and there's an opportunity to move that cumulative $70 million up?
Yeah. I'll let Glynis comment as well. I think your commentary is correct. We were able to really accelerate as we focused on that pretty significantly this year. Sort of the wild card in all that, of course, is the real estate aspects, which we certainly would have expected in a normal environment. We probably would have seen more of those dollars in the next year or so. That could change, obviously, based upon the whole commercial real estate environment. That sort of tempers us a little bit to keep at the $70 million that we've quoted. Glynis, do you want to add anything to that?
I think you've kind of covered it. I think we made a decision to try and accelerate the savings to get to the $70 million number as quickly as possible. Part of it was, we had the environment of COVID that allowed us to do that in terms of right-sizing the operation for the volume of business that we were seeing. We took advantage of that to accelerate some of those savings. Ken's comment about the real estate, in addition to what we're trying to sell, we also will get some savings in subsequent years as leases turn out. We made a decision not to buy out of those leases because buying out of a commercial real estate lease today is expensive. We made the determination not to do that buyout, but just to keep them operational until the lease term expires.
We'll get incremental savings, couple of $100,000 in years going forward, but not anything significant as those leases turn out.
Okay. That's helpful. Thank you.
Your next question comes from Matt Sheerin with Stifel Nicolaus.
Yes, thanks. Good morning, Ken and Glynis. Just following up on Adam's question regarding your relatively solid guidance for Q4. Could you talk, Ken, in terms of where you see that spending going? Is it continue to be your work from home and client devices, or is that largely played out, and are you seeing a shift more toward the on-prem infrastructure products where that obviously had been delayed for a couple of quarters?
Yeah. Thanks, Matt, for the question. Yeah, in regards to, as I think you know that from a hardware perspective, half the revenue actually comes from devices in our business and in the channel overall. Devices is a significant play of that. There's no question that Chromebook will accelerate here into Q4. It's a lot of units. It's about 30% of the unit volumes for devices. About 13% of the revenue volumes come from Chrome because of the lower ASPs. That will certainly continue to accelerate, and I think that'll actually accelerate into Q1 from what we can see, as there are certainly significant shortages out there for those devices. The public sector piece, I think will certainly be a strong growth trajectory here certainly for Q4.
As far as the infrastructure piece, I'd say it's a little bit mixed as far as, certainly some companies are recognizing that they have to digitize their business, and as companies have to digitize their business to become more modern, they also have to upgrade their infrastructure to become more modern, whether that be public cloud or whether that be private infrastructure. Certain clients are looking at that and making those investments, and others are still a little bit more like, "Hey, let's wait and see," to see how this is going to really play out, as far as COVID's concerned. We have invested in that area in regards to the infrastructure side of the business with resources, and so we're going to position ourselves to make sure that we're in a position to capture that rebound when it does occur.
As you know, this business, when you go through the 10-year cycles we've been on, you go back to the Great Recession of 2009, where we all saw pretty substantial double-digit declines in 2009 and 2010. We saw 17% growth. Go back 10 years before that with the dot-com, same sort of trajectory. We do believe that in IT, it's difficult to put these investments off for a long time, and so that they will certainly start to recover. We're not sure when that's going to occur in 2021, but we're certainly positioning ourselves to take advantage of that.
Okay. On the enterprise side, you talked about client device strength on the public sector with Chromebook, but are you seeing the same thing on the enterprise in terms of the commercial notebooks, or is that weaker now?
Yeah, we are seeing that, and again, it's very client-dependent. We are seeing a certain of our client set in the enterprise side certainly coming back to life here from a device point of view here.
Okay. Sort of backing into on your EPS guidance and revenue, it implies that gross margin may be down a little bit, but still up significantly 70 basis points, 80 basis points plus from last year. Is that positive mix shift that you've seen in the last couple of quarters, is that continuing in terms of cloud services, netted down software revenue, that sort of thing?
Yeah, that's correct, Matt. You've got that right.
Somewhat muted, Matt, by growth in hardware.
Okay. The Chromebook margins are, I would imagine, lower-
Right. Yeah.
...than the rest of your hardware.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay. Just lastly, you talked about some headcount additions and adding to the sales force. Is that happening now, and does that impact OpEx? I would imagine that OpEx, given that you still have some discretionary spend on hold, is not going to really move much from where it is now. Do you expect that the sales count increase to impact that at all?
We do expect the increase in sales and technical resources to impact that. Probably not so much in Q4, but we're starting this investment over the last quarter and going into Q4. It will be a bigger impact going into 2021, because we want to make sure that we're ready and prepared to address the improvement in the economy that we anticipate in 2021. When exactly, we don't know, but we anticipate an improvement in the economy in 2021. Some of the investments that we're making now is to be well-positioned to take advantage of that in 2021.
Okay, you gave us the PCM integration under the synergy numbers. Does any of that play out in the December quarter in terms of lower OpEx because of that?
Yeah. Well, we're going to end up exiting the quarter at $60, $65 million coming out of Q4, so there's a little incremental to that $55 million in Q4. A little-
Okay.
...increment.
All right.
$2 million.
Very good. Okay. All right. Thanks a lot.
Your next question comes from Anthony Lebiedzinski with Sidoti & Company.
Thank you for taking the questions. Other than Chromebook, are you guys seeing any other supply chain dislocations, anything to call out there?
Yeah. Thanks for the question, Anthony. A little bit on the display side. Glass is certainly under a lot of pressure. Dependent upon, obviously, whether it be touch or so forth for certain products in notebook areas, and certainly on the Chrome side. Glass is certainly a little bit of a shortage. There's still a little bit of tough situation on the processor side, dependent upon where you are on that front with AMD and Intel, as there's obviously significant demand on that areas. Those two areas, I'd say, would probably be the most areas that we're seeing, certainly constraints that lead mostly to device types of constraints that we're seeing. Not too much in the other areas of the business. Of course, displays are impacted as well.
Got it. Thanks for that. I know Europe is not a huge part of your business, but they're doing some lockdowns there in various countries there. How should we think about the impact of lockdowns in some of the countries in Europe as far as impact on your business?
Yeah, Anthony, of course, we're all reading what's the U.K. and sort of Germany and France. Pretty much going back to, I think, the way the world was for them in April. It's not like we haven't seen this before. They weathered those storms pretty well back in the spring. Right now, we're not calling for any significant change in what we're seeing there. I think they're just going back to the environment where they were. I still believe we're all now much more functional than we were in April in regards to how we conduct business. We're not projecting or anticipating any significant decline there, at least at this stage. The U.K. sort of announced it'd be four weeks sort of situation, then they extend it. Again, nothing that we're projecting to have a significant impact into our numbers.
Got it. Okay. Well, thank you and best of luck.
Thanks, Anthony.
Thanks, Anthony.
Your next question comes from Paul Coster with JPMorgan.
Yeah, thanks for taking my questions. Two really. First up, Glynis, the $30 million-$35 million of variable expenses that you expect to be added back next year. Just can you explain that a little bit better? Is that just all things being equal or, I mean, as is, or does the business have to be in growth mode for that to be the case? Anything else you can provide by way of color?
It is actually a combination. There's some things that will come back in regardless of growth. The specific larger items would be depending what happens with regards to travel, we've made some decisions around there was very little travel in 2020. We've made an assumption about what we think travel will be going into 2021. Still some savings, but up from where we are today. We've made some decisions around investments that we're making in the business. There are other discretionary areas that we pulled back on in 2020 that will come back into the business. Bonuses and executive comp will be impacted by performance in 2020. The combination of all those pieces, we assume going into 2021, will come back into the business.
If there's a down year, would that range still apply, or would you look to-
It depends on how we budget. If it's a down year, would that range still apply? I think that there's certain expenses that will come back into the business, even if it is a down year. How we address the down year would be in a different manner. If it's a down year, there are changes that we made this year that were one-year changes, and those will come back into the business. If there is a downturn, we will have to figure out other ways to address the downturn.
Got you. Okay. Thanks. Then-
And we-
The other question I had is the cloud netting that's taking place on net sales. Can you quantify the approximate revenue headwind that comes with that higher margin business? I mean, for instance, if it wasn't netted down, how much revenue would it-
Right.
...deliver as a result?
It wasn't netted down, I guess we would've had revenue growth, I mean, higher revenue growth in software. The percentage of our business that is netted is in the 35%-36% range on average. GP, sorry. GP. The pure netted business is about 35%-36% of our total GP. That's higher in Q2 given the Microsoft year-end and the higher software component that we typically have associated with Q2. It's about 39%. On average, the netted components from our business is about 35%-36%. With hardware being down to date in the results year-over-year, that is lower margin. That has helped boost our margins, as you're seeing in our results year to date.
You think you would've delivered top-line growth quite easily if it hadn't been netted down? I'm just trying to-
Yeah.
...understand this.
Yes. We would've delivered top-line growth without the netting. I myself kind of thought that as we've been netting for the past couple of years, that eventually we'd get to kind of some run rate associated with it. Cloud and digital are the winners in COVID. It's accelerated, and I actually think that it's accelerating the conversion that we have seen to date from on-prem cloud-related solutions to on-prem non-cloud to off-prem cloud solutions, and that's going to continue going forward, and it will continue to impact our revenue.
Okay. Last question, Ken, actually. I think I got the sense that Edge and hybrid are the biggest drivers, but then I kind of got a little bit lost with the commentary around the client-side hardware as well. Is it all three? If you could force rank them in terms of the growth at the moment, which is kind of driving things the most, if any of them?
Yeah. From a hardware point of view, it's clear that devices is what's driving the growth in the industry right now from a channel point of view. That's very clear. There will be positive growth in devices this year. Of course, there will be declines in server storage, networking, and the other categories from a hardware perspective. Certainly devices would be top of list. We're still, of course, very committed to and invested in the intelligent edge, the IoT areas of the business. I think that's been a little bit slowed down by COVID, where companies just are hustling down just to try to figure out how do they keep their businesses intact and not invest in those types of areas. That will come, there's no question about that, as AI continues to drive the marketplace going forward. We're still continuing to invest there.
That was certainly more muted than we would've expected in 2020, but we're confident that that certainly will recover in return.
Great. Thanks very much.
Your next question comes from Marc Wiesenberger with B. Riley Securities.
Thank you. Good morning. Can you talk about the price sensitivity across customer cohorts and maybe end product categories? Are you seeing demand become kind of any less elastic, and what are expectations for the duration of any change in behavior?
I would say that the pricing pressure's always in the marketplace, but I think it's actually been pretty rational for the most part in this environment where there's been certainly a lot less volume and demand. It's certainly a competitive environment, but we don't see it being crazy by any means or anything like that. Obviously, our gross margin certainly reflects that. I'd say it's been pretty rational at this stage. Nothing that we would say would be a concern at this stage.
Understood. Are you seeing big changes in customer preference for vendor consolidation? Maybe which product categories is the lowest hanging fruit you're seeing in terms of gaining share?
On the vendor consolidation front, a couple of areas in that. Certainly we see from a client perspective that all of our clients have been driving towards, we want to do business with less partners, as they're trying to streamline their business. That's even more indicative in this environment where they're resource-constrained and everybody's working from home, so they're trying to simplify their operations and do business with less people where they can. That consolidation, I think, is only accelerating during the COVID crisis. I think that should favor, certainly, some of the larger players in the industry who have more breadth and more capabilities. We'll see how that continues to play out. I think that's definitely happening. I think you're seeing it from a vendor point of view, from a PC front.
There's no question that the desktop notebook business is consolidating to the large players. That's been going on for quite some time. The Dells, the HPs, the Lenovos, the Apples are certainly garnering more and more of the share of the business. I think that's continuing as well. I think you're seeing the consolidation efforts, of course, even on the infrastructure side with all the acquisitions going on out there in the marketplace. I think that's just going to continue to accelerate from that point of view. Marc, what was the second part of your question?
Low hanging fruit.
Just if the vendor consolidation provides an opportunity to take share.
Yeah. I think it was the low-hanging fruit. What was that?
Product categories.
Which product categories? I think from a product category point of view, from a share point of view, the biggest area, of course, again, being notebooks. By the way, prior to going into COVID, it was about 52% desktop environment, 48% notebooks, and of course now it's like 80% notebooks, and I don't think that's going to change. I think that area is certainly the biggest area of the business and also probably the easiest for companies to take share on.
Got it. Are you seeing a change in preference in terms of duration of agreements, probably within the service segment, I would imagine the most? How should we think about maybe any potential impacts on the P&L in the near and medium term from the change in duration of agreements?
I don't know that I would say that we're necessarily seeing any change in duration of agreements. As we've made the move to the cloud, and more of a subscription-based model, agreements have been anywhere between 12 to 36 months, depending on the particular vendor and how they do it. Most agreements are cancelable ultimately, so it's not necessarily so term-dependent in some cases. There is a move by a couple of vendors to have terms and not have the cloud agreements be non-cancelable. That may be a trend going forward, but it doesn't have a significant impact on us in that regard either going forward. I haven't noticed people saying, "I used to want a 12-month term, and now we're switching to 36," or vice versa. That's not something we've heard coming back from the sales force at this time.
It comes in a measured way for us, Marc, to our business. It's not like it's one big fell swoop that would adjust-
Yeah.
...our revenue and our profit streams. It's been occurring over the last sort of five years in a very sort of measured way. That's why I don't think you're seeing. It's not like Adobe when Adobe flipped their business in a quarter or two. It's happened in a much more measured way for us.
Understood. Got it. Just final one from me. Can you remind us what levels qualify for how you think of large projects, and how did that category perform sequentially and year-over-year? Thank you.
Meaning services projects, Marc? Is that what you're talking about?
Sure. Also maybe large hardware purchase orders as well.
Okay. I would say that for us this year, particularly, one of the categories impacted the most has been those large hardware orders, as clients have kind of pulled back with regard to usually around devices is what that would be, where we do a rollout for our clients. Some of our clients typically have a hardware refresh cycle. I would say that in 2020, many clients may have put those on hold. As Ken mentioned in his comments, we're starting to see a little bit of clients starting to reengage in that in the fourth quarter. I'd say that was the hardest hit category in that regard. In terms of large projects, I guess we would play typically, I would say, in a sub-$10 million range when we're talking about a large project, not including all the hardware associated with it, okay.
Usually, there's a 5:1 pull, hardware, software versus suite services, for each $1 of services. I'd say that those this year have also been constrained, and what we're seeing much more is the move from on-prem to the cloud, either SaaS, PaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, that are not typically $10 million one-time hits that you'd see on our P&L. Those are slowing over time.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Marc.
Your final question comes from Vincent Colicchio with Barrington Research.
Yes. Ken, the sales force additions, are these going to be fairly senior folks that could sort of ramp quickly as business improves, assuming business improves next year?
Yeah, they are. This is a pretty good environment to hire folks, because good folks are available. Yeah, very selective from a field point of view. We are also additionally augmenting our inside sales team as well, and that tends to be a little less experienced folks, certainly less costly, but less experienced, but to build that pipeline of talent as well. It's really a combination. Yes, we are, on the field side, able to hire people that have experience, can bring books of business and clients, relationships with them. That's the goal and the objective that we've been on here.
Could you give us some color on your current thoughts on acquisitions? We're a year into the PCM. Maybe talk about the pipeline and pricing in the market and sort of your thoughts about doing something in the near future.
Yeah. We're certainly making sure that we maximize and optimize the PCM integration fully. We're always out there looking. As we stated, the PCM acquisition was sort of a two-year courting process. They do take long. We always have a pipeline, and of course, the timing is not very predictable. It depends on the situation. We're pretty active, always looking at that. For right now, we continue to look at acquisitions that will give us, again, more talent that we need, more tuck-in type acquisitions versus scale acquisitions. We're not opposed to any scale acquisitions. Right now, we're making sure we maximize the full integration here. If we had complete control of the timing, we wouldn't be doing a large-scale acquisition here in the near term. We're obviously always pretty active. I think the market's pretty robust.
I think many of the valuations are pretty reasonable at this stage of the game. There's definitely more opportunity there and more rational pricing in the market as far as acquisitions.
Okay, thank you. My other questions were asked.
Thanks, Vincent.
Thanks, Vincent. Welcome.
Thank you.
There are no other questions in queue.
Okay, thanks for joining us today. Have a good week, everyone.
This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.