PCP.COM Gruppe

» see pcp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 2 June 1998 a sole proprietorship in Schaffhausen called PC Power Weber Informatik was transferred into a company named PCP.CH Weber Informatik. The initials stayed with the holding company for the next twenty-five years, and the shop behind them became one of the longest-running online stores for computers and consumer electronics in Switzerland. On 14 June 2004 it converted itself into an AG.

Then came a decade of buying other people's shops. PC-Ostschweiz.ch, founded in Altnau in 2003, came in 2009, and Beck PC, a machine assembler out of Widnau, in 2012. The large one was STEG Electronics of Lucerne, founded in 1994, which combined with PCP.ch on 1 October 2014 and brought a chain of physical branches with it. Techmania followed in 2017. Along the way the group opened ComStern.de in Gottmadingen and ComStern.at in Lustenau, so the same operation was selling into three countries.

By the end there were seventeen Swiss branches trading under the Steg name and roughly a hundred million francs a year moving through them. The consumer brand PCP.ch had already been retired on 4 June 2019, five years after the merger, when Lorenz Weber posted on his own site that the two names would appear as Steg from then on. The holding company went on calling itself the PCP.COM Gruppe, which is how the group and its shops ended up dying under different names.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the shop that bought shops ~

Electronics retail at this scale runs on a thin margin and on somebody else's money. You hold stock you have not paid for, on credit that exists only because an insurer stands behind your suppliers. A group with a hundred million francs of turnover and an average profit in the higher six figures looks healthy right up to the day that insurer reconsiders.

I know this category from the buying side. I was picking up parts in Turkey across the same years, from local shops and off the forums, and for a while my frmtr signature was just a list of what was in my case. A Schaffhausen warehouse shipping into the German-speaking market was never going to be where I ordered from, but a component price list is a component price list in any language.

~ the phone call from the insurer ~

At the beginning of April 2023 Allianz Trade, the credit insurer that used to be Euler Hermes, cut the group's cover from seven million francs to four. Later it withdrew the cover entirely. Weber, who had founded the business and still owned it, said the cancellation came as a complete surprise and that the decision was enormously hard for the company to follow. Allianz Trade said only that it does not comment on individual companies.

Without supplier credit you cannot buy stock, and a retailer that cannot buy stock has months rather than quarters. Weber said the company spent those months hunting for a solution, and that takeover talks got some way along before collapsing: buyers were deterred by the integration work and investors by the unresolved insurance position. The consultant David Morant, reading it afterward for Carpathia, agreed the cancellation was the decisive event and added that the underlying weakness was an equity and liquidity ratio too thin for a market this tight.

Staff were told at midday on Friday 8 September 2023. The branches and the online shops dropped to minimal operation and then shut, the bankruptcy filing went in on 18 September, and about a hundred and thirty people lost their jobs, more than eighty of them in Switzerland. The logistics company Columbus.net went down with the group.

~ the liquidation page ~

STEG Electronics AG sits on the Schaffhausen register today as STEG Electronics AG in Liquidation. Morant's expectation was that the hundred million francs of annual spending would mostly transfer to Digitec and Brack.ch.

pcp.com and pcp.ch both still resolve. Each one redirects, carrying a tracking parameter that names the old domain it came from, to a page on weltbild.ch headed STEG Liquidation, where what is left of the stock is being sold off through a book retailer's storefront.

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