Ingram Micro Holding Corp (INGM): what the price assumes

Generated: 2026-07-29 · Exported: 2026-08-01 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/INGM

Headline

Field	Value
Ticker	INGM
Company	Ingram Micro Holding Corp
Current price	$29.84/sh
Composition	North America 36% / EMEA 29% / Asia-Pacific 28% / Latin America 7%

What The Price Assumes (Inversion)

The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.

Field	Value
Inversion basis	whole-company
Operating margin (value-band context)	0.7%
Operating margin today	1.7%
Margin compression (value-band)	-1.0pp
Implied growth	-4.0%
Multiple paid	12x operating income

The operating-margin figure is value-band context at year 12: derived from the framework's value band, a separate calculation — not part of the priced-in solve.

Solve inputs: computed at a 8.5% cost of capital with 4% terminal growth over a 5-year stage; each 1pp of cost of capital moves the implied operating-profit growth ~5.5pp.

How unusual the bet is: within-range (limited comparison data)

Reference	Value
cohort percentile (of 222 peers)	10
implied end-window share	0%

Valuation X-Ray

The price is supported by earnings-power and relative-multiple and growth-DCF value, while asset-based lands below the price. A value/asset-supported name, not a pure growth bet.

How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.

Family	Median price/FV	Models	Reads
Asset	1.89x	5	expensive
Earnings	0.90x	3	justifies
Relative	0.91x	5	justifies
Growth	1.02x	2	expensive

Families that justify the price: Earnings, Relative, Growth Families that call it expensive: Asset

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 6.0%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=15)

Model	Family	FV	Price/FV	Applicable	Methodology
DCF Perpetual Growth	Growth	—	—	no	—
DCF Exit Multiple	Growth	$32.20	0.93x	yes	Exit EV/EBITDA: 9.3x / 11.3x / 13.3x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull), 6yr
Relative Valuation	Relative	$31.62	0.94x	yes	P/E 18x (static sector reference · 2026-04), scenarios: 14.9x / 18.0x / 21.1x (bear / base = reference held flat / bull), EV/EBITDA 12x
Simple DDM	Growth	—	—	no	—
Two-Stage DDM	Growth	—	—	no	—
Simple Excess Return	Asset	$16.46	1.81x	yes	BV/sh $17.90, ROE (TTM) 8.5%, ke 9.3%
Two-Stage Excess Return	Asset	$15.78	1.89x	yes	5yr excess ROE then converge to ke=9.3%
Discounted Future Market Cap	Growth	$26.76	1.12x	yes	Rev $54.2B, growth 11% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 0.1x / 0.1x / 0.2x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull, cap 8x)
Peter Lynch Fair Value	Relative	$27.84	1.07x	yes	EPS $1.52, growth 18% (input: historical EPS growth), PEG=1.07 (Fair)
Margin Trajectory	Growth	—	—	no	—
Earnings Power Value	Earnings	$33.22	0.90x	yes	Normalized EBIT (3y avg op income, one-time charges added back) $0.98B × (1−30%) / WACC 6.0% → EPV (no growth)
Residual Income	Asset	$15.67	1.90x	yes	BV $17.90 + 5yr PV of (ROE (TTM) 8.5% − Kₑ 9.3%) × BV; BV grows 5.5%/yr
Graham Number	Asset	$24.74	1.21x	yes	√(22.5 × EPS $1.52 × BVPS $17.90) — Graham's conservative floor
EV/EBITDA Relative	Relative	$32.82	0.91x	yes	EBITDA $0.95B × sector EV/EBITDA 12.0x
FCF Yield	Earnings	$0.01	2984.00x	yes	FCF $1.4M / Kₑ 9.3% — zero-growth perpetuity (excluded from median)
SBC-Adj FCF Yield	Earnings	—	—	no	—
Ben Graham Formula	Earnings	$49.05	0.61x	yes	EPS $1.52 × (8.5 + 2×15.0%) × (4.4 / 5.3%)
ROIC-Justified P/B	Asset	$5.92	5.04x	yes	BV $17.90 × (ROIC 2.0% / WACC 6.0%)
P/Sales Sector	Relative	$577.26	0.05x	yes	Revenue $54.24B × sector P/S 2.5x
PEG Fair Value	Relative	$41.77	0.71x	yes	EPS $1.52 × (PEG 1.5 × growth 18.3% (input: historical EPS growth)) → PE 27.5x
Earnings Yield	Earnings	$16.43	1.82x	yes	EPS $1.52 / required return 9.3% (Rf 4.3% + ERP 5.0%)
Funds From Operations Multiple	Relative	—	—	no	—
Clinical Phase NPV	Growth	—	—	no	—
Merton	Asset	—	—	no	—
V5 Mechanical	—	—	—	no	—

Solvency

Field	Value
Net debt	$3.2b
Net debt / NOPAT (after-tax)	5.08x
Net debt / operating income (pre-tax)	3.57x
Interest coverage	3.0x
Burning cash	no

Bullet Takeaways

• Ingram Micro is one of the world's largest technology distributors, the wholesaler that moves hardware, software, and cloud services from vendors to hundreds of thousands of resellers across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.
• The economics are razor-thin by design: operating margin runs near 2%, so the business is about volume and working-capital efficiency, and the leverage that funds that volume is the main balance-sheet risk.
• Watch the higher-margin shift; cloud and advanced solutions are guided to outpace the corporate average in 2026, and the Xvantage digital platform is scaling fast, which is how a low-margin distributor improves its profitability.

Bull Case

The moat in distribution is not a high margin; it is scale and the logistics that competitors cannot easily replicate. Ingram Micro sits between thousands of technology vendors and hundreds of thousands of resellers, and that position is defensible precisely because it is unglamorous: a new entrant would have to build global warehousing, credit relationships with vendors, financing for resellers, and the systems to process millions of low-margin transactions reliably. The proof is in the throughput. Quarterly net sales have scaled from about $12.3 billion early in 2025 to $14.9 billion in the fourth quarter, up 11.5% year over year and ahead of expectations. A 2% operating margin sounds fragile until you multiply it across that volume; the absolute dollars of operating profit are substantial, and they come from a business almost no one else has the scale to run.

The structural improvement is the digital platform, and it is the real bull case. Ingram Micro's Xvantage platform is shifting the business from a phone-and-email model to self-service, and the early metrics are striking: self-service orders up more than 100% year over year, and the IDA digital assistant generating over half a million engagements that converted more than 100,000 opportunities into orders at nearly three times the normal conversion rate. Digital ordering lowers the cost to serve each transaction, which in a 2%-margin business is exactly where incremental profit comes from. The platform also improves vendor and customer stickiness, deepening the position that already protects the franchise.

The mix shift adds the second lever. Distribution of commodity hardware is the lowest-margin part of the business; cloud services and advanced solutions carry better economics, and management guides both to grow faster than the corporate average in 2026, with cloud expected to grow double digits. As those higher-margin lines become a larger share, the blended margin rises without the company needing to do anything heroic on the hardware side. The bull case is a scale leader using a digital platform to cut its cost to serve while tilting its mix toward higher-margin services, priced at roughly 13 times operating income with the methods reading it as inexpensive.

Bear Case

The fragility in this business is structural and sits in the combination of a wafer-thin margin and a leveraged balance sheet. Ingram Micro earns about 2% on its sales, which means there is almost no buffer between revenue and profit; a small adverse move in pricing, freight, currency, or vendor terms flows straight through to operating income because there is so little margin to absorb it. Against that thin profit sits real debt: net debt is roughly 3.6 times a year's operating income on the company's reported operating-profit basis, and interest is covered only about 3 times over. For a company whose entire model depends on financing huge inventory and receivable balances, that leverage is the pressure point. If demand softens or working-capital needs spike, the same debt that funds the volume becomes the thing that constrains it.

The demand side is cyclical and largely outside the company's control. Distribution volume tracks enterprise and consumer technology spending, which rises and falls with the economy and the IT-refresh cycle. The price already embeds a slight decline in operating profit, about negative 1% a year, which tells you the market is not expecting growth so much as stability. But a distributor's revenue can fall faster than the broad economy in a downturn, because resellers destock and vendors tighten terms at the same time, compressing both volume and margin. The thin-margin model that magnifies the upside of scale magnifies the downside of a volume decline just as forcefully.

The competitive structure caps how good the economics can ever get. Ingram Micro competes directly with other large distributors for the same vendors and the same resellers, and in a commodity business where the products are identical, competition runs on price and terms, which is what keeps the margin pinned near 2%. The Xvantage platform and the cloud mix-shift help, but they improve the margin at the edges rather than transforming it. The valuation reflects this reality: the methods read the price as supported but not cheap enough to ignore the risks, and the asset-based lens reads it as expensive because the balance sheet carries the debt. The bear case is that this is a low-margin, leveraged, cyclical distributor whose structural improvements are real but incremental, and whose downside in a spending slowdown is amplified by both the thin margin and the debt.

Valuation

The price assumes the business roughly holds, not that it grows. At about $28 (June 27, 2026) Ingram Micro trades near 13 times operating income, and inverting that says the market is paying for company-wide operating profit to decline modestly, about 1% a year, over five years. That is an unusual thing to see priced in: the market is not asking the company to grow, it is asking it not to deteriorate much. For a thin-margin distributor in a cyclical end market, that is a coherent bet, but it means the upside comes from any improvement at all against a baseline of slight decline.

The methods we use to triangulate split in a way that captures the trade-off. The earnings-power and relative-multiple methods read the price as supported or cheap, valuing the substantial absolute operating profit the scale produces. The asset-based lens reads the price as expensive, and the reason is the leverage: the balance sheet carries meaningful debt against a small equity base, so an asset-value method that nets out the debt lands low. That split is the valuation story: the business throws off real cash relative to its price, but the capital structure means a chunk of the enterprise value belongs to lenders. Against its distribution peers, the multiple is in line, so this is not a name that stands out as cheap or rich within its cohort; it is priced like what it is.

Solvency is where the analysis has to be careful, because two leverage measures tell different stories. On the company's reported operating-profit basis, net debt is roughly 3.6 times a year's operating income with interest coverage near 3 times, which is meaningful leverage for a thin-margin business. Management points to a more favorable net-debt-to-adjusted-EBITDA ratio of about 1.0 times and has emphasized debt reduction and record free cash flow, the difference being that adjusted EBITDA adds back depreciation and other items that operating income does not. Both are real; the conservative operating-income lens is the one that matters most in a downturn, because that is the profit available to service debt when EBITDA add-backs do not pay interest. The buyer at this price is underwriting a scale distributor improving its mix and its digital efficiency, at a fair multiple, while accepting the cyclicality and the leverage that come with the model.

Catalysts

The recent results show steady scaling. Ingram Micro reported quarterly net sales of about $12.3 billion in the first quarter of 2025 and $12.8 billion in the second, with non-GAAP earnings near $0.61 per share each quarter, and fourth-quarter net sales of $14.9 billion, up 11.5% year over year and ahead of consensus. The standout operational story was Xvantage: self-service orders up over 100% year over year, and the IDA digital assistant converting more than 100,000 opportunities at nearly three times the normal rate, with IDA-driven revenue a mid-single-digit share of the total and guided to surpass 10% in 2026.

The forward guidance points to mix improvement. Management guides cloud and advanced solutions to outpace the corporate average in 2026, with cloud expected to grow double digits, and continues to emphasize debt reduction and free-cash-flow generation. The catalysts to watch are the growth rate of cloud and advanced solutions relative to the hardware base, the pace of Xvantage adoption and the rising IDA revenue share, and the trajectory of deleveraging, because together they determine whether the blended margin rises enough to re-rate a stock the market currently prices for slight decline.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

Core business (reported)

• SNX (TD SYNNEX CORPORATION)
• FY2025 10-K: …and networking solutions built specific to our customers' workloads and data center environments. We combine our core strengths in distribution with demand generation, supply chain management and design and integration solutions to help our customers achieve greater efficiencies in time to market, cost minimization,…
• FY2025 10-K: …operating results could be adversely affected. We experience customer concentration and intense competition which could adversely impact our revenue. Our business experiences customer concentration from time to time. One customer accounted for 11%, 12% and 11% of our total revenue in fiscal years 2025, 2024 and 2023,…
• AVT (AVNET, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …customer receivables, which may result in provisions to create reserves, write-offs, reduced access to liquidity, higher financing costs, and increased pressure on cash flows. An increase in or prolonged period of inflation could affect the Company's profitability and cash flows, due to higher wages, higher operating…
• FY2025 10-K: …leading suppliers. In addition, shifts in suppliers' strategies, or performance and delivery issues, may negatively affect the Company's financial results. These conditions make it more difficult to manage the Company's business and predict future performance. The competitive landscape has also experienced…
• ARW (ARROW ELECTRONICS, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …national electronic components and enterprise computing solutions distributors, as well as numerous other smaller, specialized competitors who generally focus on narrower market sectors, products, or industries. Such robust competition broadly, and within each region and market sector, creates pricing and margin…
• FY2025 10-K: …environment, both in the United States and internationally. The company competes with other large multinational and national electronic components and enterprise computing solutions distributors, as well as numerous other smaller, specialized competitors who generally focus on narrower markets, products, or…
• WCC (WESCO International, Inc.)
• FY2025 10-K: …condition could be adversely affected. We may consider outsourcing additional functions in the future, further heightening these risks. An increase in competition could decrease sales, profit margins, and earnings. We operate in a highly competitive industry and compete directly with global, national, regional and…
• FY2025 10-K: …We may be unable to pass through incremental costs to customers in a timely manner or at all without adversely affecting our price competitiveness or margins. If we are unable to adjust pricing, sourcing or inventory strategies effectively, or if customers reduce or defer purchases (including due to demand…
• FERG (Ferguson Enterprises Inc.)
• FY2025 10-K: …network across North America, including three import centers, 11 regional distribution centers and 1,746 branch locations as of July 31, 2025. Our network also includes six MDCs which provide greater access to key strategic markets and allows us to bring our products closer to our customers. These MDCs include…
• FY2025 10-K: …changes in demand may heighten the risks described in the risk factor titled "We may not rapidly identify or effectively respond to direct and/or end customers' wants, expectations or trends, which could adversely affect our relationship with customers, our reputation, the demand for our products and our market…
• RS (RELIANCE, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …profit margin are important operating and financial measures as their fluctuations can have a significant impact on our earnings. Gross profit and gross profit margin, as presented, are not necessarily comparable with similarly titled measures for other companies. ​ Overview ​ Net sales were $14.29 billion in 2025,…
• FY2025 10-K: …of a reduced number of shipping days, resulting from holidays observed by the Company as well as vacation and extended holiday closures at some of our customers. The number of shipping days in each quarter has an impact on our quarterly sales and profitability. We cannot predict whether period-to-period fluctuations…
• GWW (W.W. GRAINGER, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …In the Endless Assortment segment, Grainger offers an expansive product assortment that contains millions of products, including those outside of traditional industrial MRO categories. Zoro offers approximately 13 million products and MonotaRO provides access to approximately 29 million products, primarily through…
• FY2025 10-K: …and market-specific factors. The Company's revenue is primarily comprised of MRO product sales and related activities. The Company's presentation of revenue by reportable segment and customer industry most reasonably depicts how the nature, amount, timing and uncertainty of the Company's revenue and cash flows are…
• GPC (GENUINE PARTS CO)
• FY2025 10-K: …by mutual consent. COMPETITION Our Global Automotive and Industrial businesses operate in highly competitive markets, with a wide range of national, regional and local businesses. In our Automotive segments, competition comes from specialty parts chains, automobile manufacturers (including those selling parts for…
• FY2025 10-K: …we may be forced to reduce our prices if our competitors reduce their prices or increase promotional spending, which could result in a material decline in our revenues and earnings. Increased competition among distributors of automotive and industrial parts, including increased availability among digital and…

Methodology Note

• Priced-in inversion: the valuation is inverted on the current price to recover the operating-income growth, duration, and steady-state margin the price embeds (ROE for financials, FFO growth for REITs).
• Valuation x-ray: the valuation models, grouped into four families (asset, earnings, relative, growth). Each model is expressed as a price/FV ratio (distance from price), not a point fair-value estimate. The spread across families is the disagreement.
• Solvency: net cash/debt, net-debt-to-NOPAT, interest coverage, and share-count CAGR from EDGAR financials (net debt / FFO and fixed-charge coverage for REITs; regulatory-capital framing for financials).
• Peer cohorts: per-segment comparables with deep-linkable SEC filing citations.

Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.

Sources

Ingram Micro 2026 guidance · Ingram Micro 2025 results, 8-K