Item 1. Business

Our Company

CDW Corporation (together with its subsidiaries, the “Company,” “CDW” or “we”), a Fortune 500 company and member of the S&P 500 Index, is a leading multi-brand provider of information technology (“IT”) solutions to business, government, education and healthcare customers in the United States (“US”), the United Kingdom (“UK”) and Canada. Our broad array of offerings ranges from discrete hardware and software products to integrated IT solutions and services that include on-premise and cloud capabilities across hybrid infrastructure, digital experience and security.

We are vendor, technology and consumption model unbiased, offering a broad selection of products and multi-branded IT solutions. Our solutions are delivered in physical, virtual and cloud-based environments through approximately 10,900 customer-facing coworkers, including sellers, highly-skilled specialists and engineers. We are a leading sales channel partner for many original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”), software publishers, cloud providers (collectively, our “vendor partners”) and wholesale distributors, whose products we sell or include in the solutions we offer. We provide our vendor partners with a cost-effective way to reach customers and deliver a consistent brand experience through our established end-market coverage, technical expertise and extensive customer access.

We simplify the complexities of technology solutions across design, selection, procurement, integration and management for our customers. Our goal is to have our customers, regardless of their size, view us as a trusted adviser and extension of their IT workforce. Our multi-brand offering approach across our vendor partners enables us to provide the solutions and services that best address each customer’s specific requirements to enable their desired business outcomes.

We have capabilities to provide integrated IT solutions in approximately 150 countries for customers with primary locations in the US, UK and Canada, which are large and growing markets. These are highly fragmented markets served by thousands of IT resellers and solutions providers. We believe that demand for IT will outpace general economic growth in the markets we serve, fueled by new technologies, including hybrid and cloud computing and artificial intelligence, as well as growing end-user demand for security, efficiency and productivity.

Value Proposition

We are positioned in the middle of the IT ecosystem where we procure products from OEMs, software publishers, cloud providers and wholesale distributors and provide added value to our customers by helping them navigate through complex options and implement the best solution for their business. In this role, we believe we provide unique value to both our vendor partners and our customers.

Our value proposition to our customers						Our value proposition to our vendor partners
●			Broad selection of products and multi-branded IT solutions			●			Access to over 250,000 customers
●			Value-added services with integration capabilities			●			Large and established customer channels
●			Highly-skilled specialists and engineers			●			Strong distribution and implementation capabilities
●			Solutions across IT lifecycle			●			Customer relationships driving insight into technology roadmaps

Customers

We provide integrated IT solutions to over 250,000 business, government, education and healthcare customers throughout the US, UK and Canada.

We serve our customers through sales teams focused on customer end-markets that are supported by highly-skilled specialists and engineers. Our market segmentation allows us to customize our offerings and to provide enhanced expertise in designing and implementing IT solutions that meet our customer’s specific needs.

We have three reportable segments: Corporate, Small Business and Public. Our Corporate segment primarily serves US private sector business customers with more than 250 employees. Our Small Business segment primarily serves US private sector business customers with up to 250 employees. Our Public segment is comprised of government agencies and education and healthcare institutions in the US. We also have two other operating segments: CDW UK and CDW Canada, each of which do not meet the reportable segment quantitative thresholds and, accordingly, are included in an all other category (“Other”).

In our US business, which represents approximately 90% of our Net sales, we currently have five dedicated customer channels: corporate, small business, government, education and healthcare, each of which generated $1.5 billion or greater in Net sales in 2024. Net sales to customers in the UK and Canada combined generated $2.5 billion in 2024. We believe this diversity of customer end-markets provides us with multiple avenues for growth and has been a key factor in our ability to weather economic and technology cycles and gain market share.

Partners

We offer more than 100,000 products and services from more than 1,000 vendor partners, including well-established companies such as Adobe, APC, Apple, Amazon Web Services, Broadcom Inc., Cisco, Dell Technologies, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., IBM, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, NetApp, Nutanix, Palo Alto Networks, Pure Storage and Samsung, as well as from emerging technology companies. This broad portfolio of vendor partners and technologies enables us to offer customers significant options and meet customer demand for the products and solutions that best meet their needs. We believe our value proposition to vendor partners enables us to evolve our offering as new technologies emerge and new companies seek us as a channel partner.

In 2024, we generated $2.0 billion of Net sales from each of our three largest vendor partners. We have received the highest level of certification from major vendor partners such as Broadcom Inc., Cisco, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, NetApp, Nutanix, Palo Alto Networks and Samsung which reflects the extensive product and solution knowledge and capabilities that we bring to our customers. These certifications also provide us with access to favorable pricing, tools and resources, including vendor incentive programs, which we use to provide additional value to our customers. Our vendor partners also regularly recognize us with top awards and select us to develop and grow new customer solutions.

Product Procurement

We may purchase all or only some of the products our vendor partners offer for resale to our customers or for inclusion in the solutions we offer. Each vendor partner agreement provides for specific terms and conditions, which may include one or more of the following: product return privileges, price protection policies, purchase discounts and vendor incentive programs, such as purchase or sales rebates and cooperative advertising reimbursements. We also purchase software from major software publishers and cloud providers for resale to our customers or for inclusion in the solutions we offer. Our agreements allow us to resell cloud based solutions, software or other licensed products to the end-user customer.

In addition to purchasing products directly from our vendor partners, we purchase products from wholesale distributors for resale to our customers or for inclusion in the solutions we offer. These wholesale distributors provide logistics management and supply-chain services for us, as well as for our vendor partners.

Inventory Management

We operate two distribution centers in North America and one distribution center in the UK, which combined provide more than 1 million square feet in size. Leveraging our distribution and logistics capabilities, we handle and ship approximately 26 million units annually on an aggregate basis from our distribution centers.

We also have drop-shipment arrangements with many of our OEMs and wholesale distributors, which permit us to offer products to our customers without having to take physical delivery at our distribution centers. These arrangements represented approximately 54% of total North America Net sales in 2024.

We believe that the location of our distribution centers allows us to efficiently ship products to our customers and provide timely access to our principal distributors. We believe that our logistics and configuration capabilities delivered by our highly-skilled and certified team enable us to customize technology for our customers to meet their unique needs.

We believe competitive sources of supply are available in substantially all of the product categories that we offer.

Competition

The market for technology products, solutions and services is highly competitive and subject to economic conditions and rapid technological changes. This competitive environment includes the ability to tailor solutions to customer needs, the quality and breadth of product and service offerings, knowledge and expertise of sales force, customer service, price, product availability, speed of delivery and credit availability. We face competition from resellers, manufacturers who sell directly to customers, large service providers and system integrators, cloud providers, e-commerce companies, and office supply retailers, among others. Smaller, local or regional value-added resellers typically focus on a single solution suite or portfolio of solutions from one or two vendor partners.

We believe we are well positioned to compete within this marketplace due to our competitive advantages. We expect the competitive landscape to continue to evolve as new technologies and consumption models emerge, such as cloud-based and other “as a service” solutions, hyper-converged infrastructure, embedded software solutions and solutions that incorporate artificial intelligence. While innovation can help our business as it creates new offerings for us to sell, it can also disrupt our business model and create new and stronger competitors. For additional information on the risks associated with competition, see “Item 1A. Risk Factors.”

We believe we have sustainable competitive advantages that differentiate us in the marketplace. We focus on providing high quality service to gain new customers and retain existing customers. We have built a strong sales organization and deep services and solutions capabilities over time and expect to continue to invest to enhance these capabilities. We believe the combination of our competitive advantages of scale, performance-driven culture and enhanced capabilities will help drive sustainable, profitable growth for us today and in the future. Our scale enables us to have a national and international footprint, as well as invest in resources to meet specific customer end-market needs. Our sellers are organized around unique customer end-markets that are both vertically and geographically focused. Our scale enables our ability to invest in specialists and engineers who work directly with our sellers to help customers implement complex IT solutions. We have cross-border relationships that enable us to serve the needs of our US, UK and Canadian-based customers in approximately 150 countries. Our strong, execution-oriented culture is underpinned by our compensation system.

Our Offerings

Our offerings range from discrete hardware and software products and services to complex integrated solutions including one or more of these elements. We believe our customers increasingly view technology purchases as integrated solutions vital to their strategies, business outcomes and missions rather than discrete product and services categories. Our hardware category includes notebooks/mobile devices (including tablets), network communications (“netcomm products”), collaboration hardware, data storage and servers, desktop computers and other hardware. Our software category includes cloud solutions, software assurance, application suites, security, virtualization, collaboration and productivity applications, operating systems and network management. Our services include advisory and design, software development, implementation, managed services and warranties.

IT is important to both critical business operations and to drive greater growth and productivity. To help our customers accomplish this, we have built a robust portfolio of solutions across hybrid infrastructure, digital experience, security, digital velocity and services that we provide in on-premise, hybrid or cloud-based environments.

We provide customers with technology solutions and services on the public cloud, which reside off-premise on a public (shared) infrastructure, private cloud solutions, which reside on customer premises and hybrid cloud solutions that deliver the benefits of both public and private options. Our migration, integration and managed services help our customers simplify cloud adoption and management, across the entire IT lifecycle. Engineers work with our customers to design cloud solutions meeting their organizational, technology and financial objectives.

We offer a broad portfolio of integrated solutions that include the following on-premise, hybrid and cloud capabilities:

*•*Hybrid Infrastructure: We assess our customers application infrastructure need, design flexible, resilient and efficient solutions and manage the solution throughout its lifecycle. Our broad portfolio of hardware and software products, encompassing both on and off-premise solutions, enables us to provide well-integrated solutions, including converged and hyper-converged infrastructure, physical and virtualized servers, software defined automation and orchestration solutions, hybrid storage, energy-efficient power and cooling, and data center networking.

• Digital Experience: We build end-to-end solutions that deliver access to applications that improve our customers’ productivity regardless of device or location. We connect our customers’ physical devices, including laptops, desktops, IP Phones, mobile devices and print systems. We utilize collaboration solutions to unite applications via the integration of products that facilitate the use of multiple enterprise communication methods including email, persistent chat, social media, voice and video. We also host cloud-based collaboration solutions. We enable our customers with artificial intelligence (“AI”) solutions that empower their end users and drive efficiency in business-critical functions. Our solutions provide the tools that allow our customers’ employees to share knowledge, ideas and information among each other and with clients and partners effectively, securely and quickly.

• Security: We assess our customers’ security needs and provide them with tools and services to help effectively manage risk, increase business continuity and operational efficiency, and improve their end user experience. We are a security solutions integrator that combines our expertise in advisory, design, solution architecture and implementation services. Our customer solutions can take the form of hardware, software or Software as a Service across a multitude of categories such as: endpoint security, email security, web security, intrusion prevention, identity and access

management, next-generation firewall, security service edge, security information and event management, exposure and threat management, governance, risk and compliance, data security and governance, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, virtual private network services, network access control and physical security. Security consulting engagements include security maturity assessments, policy and procedure gap analysis, security roadmaps and health checks.

• Digital Velocity: We deliver advanced digital transformation solutions that enable organizations to modernize their IT infrastructure, applications and operations. Leveraging expertise in cloud-native deployment, DevOps, artificial intelligence and automation, we help customers improve business outcomes through scalable and secure technology implementations. We enable specific customer business needs through customer software engineering engagements, providing custom application development, modernization and integration services, as well as talent orchestration solutions that give our customers access to technical resources that supplement their workforce for project-based engagements and periods of peak demand.

For each of the solutions areas above, we provide services that help organizations plan, design, configure, orchestrate and manage technology for their unique needs. Our offerings demonstrate our expertise in the most critical technology areas for our customers. Our highly-skilled specialists and engineers have expertise in integrated cloud, collaboration, data center, mobility and security business technology, from the physical to the application layer. We leverage best-in-class partner technology platforms to seamlessly architect and manage disparate IT platforms into integrated business technology solutions.

Although we believe customers increasingly view technology purchases as solutions rather than discrete product and service categories, our Net sales by major category, based upon our internal category classifications, was as follows:

						Year Ended December 31,
						2024												2023												2022
(dollars in millions)						Net Sales						Percentage of Total Net Sales						Net Sales						Percentage of Total Net Sales						Net Sales						Percentage of Total Net Sales
Hardware:
Notebooks/Mobile Devices						$	5,089.9					24.2		%				$	4,690.5					21.9		%				$	6,179.7					26.0		%
Netcomm Products						2,538.2						12.1						3,185.4						14.9						2,729.7						11.5
Collaboration						1,770.6						8.4						1,909.7						8.9						2,394.8						10.1
Data Storage and Servers						2,133.8						10.2						2,240.7						10.5						2,479.0						10.4
Desktops						1,111.2						5.3						1,069.1						5.0						1,284.9						5.4
Other Hardware						2,575.4						12.3						2,607.2						12.3						3,022.9						12.7
Total Hardware						15,219.1						72.5						15,702.6						73.5						18,091.0						76.1
Software(1)						3,804.4						18.1						3,799.3						17.8						3,684.9						15.5
Services(1)						1,867.3						8.9						1,761.3						8.2						1,842.0						7.8
Other(2)						107.9						0.5						112.8						0.5						130.8						0.6
Total Net sales						$	20,998.7					100.0		%				$	21,376.0					100.0		%				$	23,748.7					100.0		%

(1)Certain software and services revenue is recorded on a net basis for accounting purposes. As a result, the category percentage of Net sales is not representative of the category percentage of gross profits.

(2)Includes items such as delivery charges to customers.

Our Internal Capabilities

Human Capital Management

Our long-standing values and philosophies of success are based on fostering a welcoming, respectful, accountable and fair culture where coworkers have the opportunity to thrive. This culture, along with strong training and development, competitive compensation and opportunities for meaningful careers, drives business results and competitive advantage.

We have approximately 15,100 coworkers across the globe, with 11,500 coworkers in the US and 3,600 coworkers in international locations. More than 50% of our US Net sales are generated by account managers who have more than seven years of tenure with CDW. Our coworker relations are strong, and none of our coworkers are represented by a labor union or covered by a collective bargaining agreement.

One CDW

One CDW reflects the work we do to find, attract and retain top talent, encourage a welcoming and respectful culture, create meaningful partnerships across teams, and ensure coworkers have the tools and opportunities to grow and help the business succeed.

Coworker Engagement

We strive to create a culture of collaboration, respect and individual growth and reward. Our coworker engagement strategy utilizes periodic surveys as well as virtual listening groups to gain a real-time understanding of the coworker experience at CDW. As a result of our coworkers’ consistent engagement, we have garnered meaningful feedback and recommendations, which have led to measurable and impactful results.

Training & Development

We focus on skills enhancement, leadership development, innovation excellence and professional growth throughout our coworkers’ careers. Our programs include, but are not limited to leadership development trainings, unique developmental opportunities for our high-potential emerging leaders, a robust training program for new sales coworkers, technical skill development training, a 12-month apprentice-style program for aspiring engineers and coworker access to over 20,000 on-demand educational modules with new content updated frequently.

Total Rewards

Our total rewards philosophy provides market competitive compensation and benefits designed to attract, retain and motivate our coworkers. We pay for performance through our compensation programs which are aligned to both individual and company performance. Our sellers’ compensation is aligned to their individual performance and provides substantially uncapped commission opportunity. We provide a comprehensive benefits package to our coworkers, including healthcare, retirement plans with profit sharing and match, tuition assistance, parental leave policies, adoption assistance, paid time off, paid volunteer hours and philanthropic match programs based upon eligibility and location.

Health and Safety

We are committed to prioritizing the health and well-being of our coworkers. We dedicate time and resources to identify safety hazards of all types, mitigate safety risk and routinely train our coworkers using industry best-practices as our standard, as well as provide increased access to mental health resources.

Oversight and Management

Our Coworker Success organization is responsible for the strategy and management of coworker-related matters, working in concert with all our leaders. Our Board understands the importance of our respectful, performance-driven culture to our ongoing success and is actively engaged with our Chair and Chief Executive Officer and our Chief Human Resources Officer across a broad range of human capital management topics.

Marketing

We market the CDW brand to US, UK and Canadian audiences through various channels, including mass media, digital, print, social media and other emerging channels. We target current and prospective customers through integrated marketing programs including email, display ads, paid search, social media, events and sponsorships. These programs are supported by integrated communication efforts targeting technology decision-makers, influencers and the general public using a combination of expert technology articles, videos, case studies, media interviews and speaking events.

As a result of our relationships with vendor partners, a significant portion of our advertising and marketing expenses is reimbursed through cooperative advertising programs. These programs are at the discretion of our vendor partners and are typically tied to sales or other commitments to be met by us within a specified period. We believe that our results and analytical techniques for measuring marketing efficacy differentiates us from our competitors.

Information Technology Systems

We maintain customized IT and unified communication systems that enhance our ability to provide prompt, efficient and expert service to our customers. In addition, these systems enable centralized management of key functions, including purchasing, inventory management, billing and collection of accounts receivable, sales, distribution and financial accounting and reporting. Our systems provide us with thorough and detailed information regarding key aspects of our business. These capabilities help us to continuously enhance productivity, ship customer orders quickly and efficiently, respond appropriately to industry changes and provide high quality customer service. We believe our websites and software tools, which provide electronic order processing and advanced features, such as order tracking, reporting and asset management, make it easy for customers to transact business with us and ultimately strengthen our customer relationships. We are in the process of implementing a new enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) system, along with other system transformation initiatives, that will enable us to streamline processes and enhance visibility in our key business processes. The significant system transformation initiatives, including ERP, are anticipated to be released in 2025 with incremental system transformation releases continuing in 2026.

Available Information

We maintain a website at www.cdw.com. You may access our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 with the SEC free of charge at our website as soon as reasonably practicable after such material is electronically filed with, or furnished to, the SEC. Our website and the information contained on that site, or connected to that site, are not incorporated into and are not a part of this report.

Information about our Executive Officers

The following table lists the name, age as of February 21, 2025 and positions of each executive officer of the Company.

Name			Age			Position
Christine A. Leahy			60			Chair of our Board of Directors since January 2023; President and Chief Executive Officer and member of our Board of Directors since January 2019; Chief Revenue Officer from July 2017 to December 2018.
Sona Chawla			57			Chief Growth and Innovation Officer since January 2020; President, Kohl’s Corporation (an omnichannel retailer) from May 2018 to October 2019 and Chief Operating Officer, Kohl’s Corporation from November 2015 to May 2018.
Elizabeth H. Connelly			59			Chief Commercial Officer since October 2024; Senior Vice President, Vertical Markets, from January 2024 to October 2024; Senior Vice President, Healthcare from September 2022 to December 2023; Chief Human Resources Officer and Senior Vice President, Coworker Services from December 2018 to September 2022.
Frederick J. Kulevich			59			Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary since October 2017 and Interim Chief People Officer from November 2023 to September 2024.
Albert J. Miralles			55			Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President, Enterprise Business Operations since January 2025; Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer from September 2021 to January 2025; Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, CNA Financial Corporation (a commercial property and casualty insurance company) from February 2020 to September 2021; President, CNA Warranty from October 2019 to September 2021; Executive Vice President and Chief Risk Officer of the CNA Insurance Companies from January 2018 to October 2019.
Katherine E. Sanderson			49			Senior Vice President, Coworker Success and Chief Human Resources Officer since September 2024; Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, R1 RCM (a healthcare technology and services company) from November 2018 to September 2024.