Mark Lu, renowned as one of the pioneers of the South African IT distribution channel, has hung up his “trader’s hat” with the announcement that he has officially left Corex, the distributor he founded in 2003.
Lu sold Corex in 2018 to Partner Tech Corporation – a subsidiary of the then $25-billion conglomerate and Taiwanese-listed Qisda Group – but signed a five-year management agreement as part of the acquisition deal. That contract has now been fulfilled and Lu’s final day at the company was 31 July.
But his stellar career in distribution began long before the establishment of Corex.
In 1995 he co-founded with his wife, Ann, one of the country’s leading distributors – Rectron. In 1998 he took Rectron to the main board of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) and, at the time, aged just 32 was the youngest CEO of a company listed on the bourse.
Specialising mainly in computer components at the time, Lu subsequently reached the milestone that every distributor of the day aspired to within a decade – to be a R1-billion enterprise. It was at this stage of its growth that Lu sold Rectron to the Mustek Group.
As part of the group, and as Rectron’s product portfolio evolved from components into more mainstream technology and brands, Lu then launched Corex in 2003 – its core focus being on the components sector that most of the distribution channel was then divesting from.
Lu took Corex out of the Mustek group in 2012 and set about transforming it from a business-to-consumer (B2C) distributor to a business-to-business (B2B) organisation. Testimony to the success of Lu’s new vision for the company was its acquisition by the Qisda Group just six years later.
And further testament to his entrepreneurial skills and business acumen were the lesser-publicised ventures he launched – and subsequently sold – during this same period.
In 2006, for example, he founded Gigazone which he subsequently sold to Gigabyte in 2010; and in 2012 there was Partnertech Africa – sold to Qisda at the same time as Corex.
And while his flair for distribution may be sorely missed in the local channel, Lu says that he is not abandoning the tech industry completely.
“While I may be stepping away from ICT distribution, I’m not leaving the technology world entirely,” he says. “There are many, many interesting developments happening in technology at the moment and I’m exploring some of them – security, food tech, mining, EV.
“Those are just a couple of them,” Lu says.