“This year we celebrate 25 years of ELKO. Each year it has changed. We grew from a small local company to one that supplies IT goods directly to more than ten countries and indirectly to almost all Eastern European countries with a presence in 12 countries,” Mednis says.
Starting with PC components for local assembly, ELKO managed to keep up with the quickly-changing trends in the IT sector, supplying notebooks, smartphones, tablets and other goods. It now has a product line of 29,000 different items which it supplies to 7,700 clients. Turnover in 2017 was 1.5 billion dollars and the group employs more than 700 people, amking it a very important part pof Latvia's national economy.
Interestingly, Mednis notes that one current trend is a return to selling individual components, driven in large part by things like Bitcoin mining and the computer gaming industry where players want to customise their systems.
“You have to change with the times, and it is a challenge, but I think in our industry this is the interesting part – it never gets boring. If you are too late, you can be gone from the market very quickly.”
Export Markets
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic , Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan
Māra Skudra