Mwave acquisition considered for years: The digiDirect Group

The acquisition of Mwave by The digiDirect Group has been one that has been in the works for some time – the trading name for Esel went into voluntary administration last week.

The group’s director of retail and logistics, Haig Kayserian, told ARN that conversations around Mwave’s acquisition were happening in the background when The digiDirect Group was in talks with Booktopia’s administrators, which led to a deal in August 2024 saying it had “a pipeline of businesses that we’re looking at.”

Discussions about Mwave didn’t work out at the time, but there had always been an underlying interest in the retailer.

“We’ve watched each other for a very long period – watched the growth of each other’s businesses – and there’s been a mutual respect that has developed between these two entities,” Kayserian said.

“Over the years, we were always interested in Mwave because we considered that our customers were being becoming more intertwined as the years went by.

“We couldn’t reach any understanding on how to acquire Mwave over the years, but opportunity knocked. Mwave was in a situation where the conversation made the most sense and we were always interested in this business. It wasn’t a reflex or a reaction, it was a strategic acquisition that we’ve been interested in for a long time.”

EDGE 2025

A new home

With Mwave now coming under The digiDirect Group, Kayserian said it had acquired “basically everything that we need in order to continue the operations of the Mwave business”.

“That includes the brand, trademarks, the domain name, all of the databases, software, staff — everything that you need to make everything tick in that place,” he said.

“We believed one of the key assets of the company was the staff — the business was the staff — and in order to make the business continue to achieve goals, it’s really important to bring the staff on board.”

Kayserian said the digiDirect Group would honour all customer orders, echoing the blog post on Mwave’s website that it would continue operating as usual.

“Customers are willing to wait for in demand products like graphics cards, for example, and they buy their place in a queue — and that’s millions of dollars in value which is already paid for,” he said.

“We’ve said that we will accept the responsibility to honour all the customer orders, make them whole, keep their place in the queue and work with our suppliers to fulfil their orders in good time.

“We’ve also told the administrators that we’re keen on buying the stock, but obviously there’s a whole process that the administrators have to go through with the vendors to confirm whose stock is whose.”

The acquisition will also see Mwave make use of the digiDirect Group’s business-to-consumer (B2C) warehouse in Strathfield South, NSW, which he said is fully automated, equipped with robotic automatic packing machines.

Kayserian stated that Mwave customers will receive “a level of fulfilment that is only able to be matched by very few companies in Australia”.

“One thing with us is we’re here to fully supercharge Mwave and resource [it] like it deserves to be,” he said.

“All of this is going to be powered by our B2C fulfilment centre, which is where Booktopia calls home and now digiDirect calls home as well.”

Kayserian’s comments echo those of Kradjian, who said in a statement that he believed “we will provide a great home for the Mwave business, especially considering the infrastructure we have in our Group, most notably in our advanced customer fulfilment centre, and the collective expertise among our personnel across multiple departments”.

“Mwave has been a company we have long admired and felt would provide a natural complement to our businesses. The business has been a pioneer in the technology space and enables us to drive scale in a fast-growing category, borne from consumer demand, fuelled by the continued growth of the gaming community,” he said.

Intertwined customers

Moving forward, Kayserian said Mwave will remain as its own standalone business, despite similarities to its own digiDirect online storefront, with the two sites selling similar stock.

However, Mwave specialises in PCs and components while digiDirect’s specialties is cameras. Despite this, Kayserian said both sites play off each other.

“Although there is some crossover in products, the business serves a community of creators that has very specific needs and it does that very well. Increasingly, the buyer of the camera and the buyer of the computer have become more intertwined and that’s just something that’s happened naturally,” he said.

“Content creators are also gamers; Gamers are also content creators. People who are doing photography these days are also buying high-end monitors and buying very good systems for their workstations.

“There is an intertwining of this and digiDirect has successfully been trying to dabble in that space as well in order to increase the distance between ourselves and our ceiling. So, we’re not just selling photo and video equipment, which is our anchor, but we’re also selling some of the peripheral items that form part of the greater workstations of today’s content creators.”

In addition, Kayserian said the group of businesses within The digiDirect Group’s remit will be “supercharged in our ability to service that community”.

“ Mwave in itself will live as the brand that is serving the community that it served so well over the last two decades,” he added.

EDGE 2025