Irvine-based Ingram Micro Inc. has run a steady-as-she-goes route to becoming the world’s biggest technology product purveyor and service seller, including an acquisitive several years across the globe, honing its systems, staying with fast-changing technology trends, and carving out a dominant spot in what’s often a low-margin business.
Now part of Tianjin Tianhai Investment Co., a unit of China-based HNA Group, and worth about $6 billion and change, Ingram ships to a network of some 300,000 resellers, and has annual revenue exceeding $50 billion.
It’s followed a similar tried-and-true method—employee volunteerism on company time, matching charitable gifts, and the like—at a slow-and-steady pace.
Well, except perhaps for the slow part of late.
“Volunteerism has actually increased by 40%” in the past year, Kendra Angier, an Ingram vice president for human resources, told the Business Journal last week.
One OC
Angier oversees U.S. community relations and philanthropic activities at Ingram, which this week is on the Business Journal’s Civic 50 list (see page 31).
She said the “engagement by our associates and leaders” involves a big chunk of Ingram’s 1,000 local workers.
The paid volunteering is two to six hours per quarter; matching covers employee gifts from $25 to $1,500 per person per year. Each element has become “a huge attraction, retention and engagement factor for us.”
Instead of making corporate gifts from the top, she said, employees “pick who they want to give to and when.”
Ingram began working with nonprofit booster—and Civic 50 co-presenter—Santa Ana-based OneOC, a few years back, a move Angier credits with accelerating Ingram’s corporate and employee community philanthropy.
Many Efforts
“Social responsibility” is integral to Ingram, she said, helping people locally and making the tech firm “a meaningful place to work.”
Ingram and its people have backed Girls Inc., Big Brothers Big Sisters of Orange County & Inland Empire, the Orange County Food Bank and Rise Against Hunger, and, globally, Red Cross. Giving includes in-kind, corporate, and employee donations.
For the Red Cross, Angier said Ingram mobilizes in places where it has a corporate presence, which after numerous acquisitions over the years puts the company in the midst of needs on several continents.
Ingram has helped after hurricanes in the Caribbean, earthquakes in Mexico and, “in our backyard [with] some of the fires in California.”
The think-and-act globally and locally strategy brings Ingram in with charitable groups in those areas, including in OC.
