European IT distribution through August 2026 kept surfacing the same pattern. Revenues look strong. Units sold do not. That gap is the story of the month.

Start with the components market, because that is where the pressure originates. RAM average selling prices have risen a staggering 477% against the July-to-September 2025 baseline that Context uses as its reference point, the last period before the shortage crisis began distorting prices. SSDs have more than doubled. Servers are up 155%, HDDs 83%. Set those figures against the volume side and the picture turns uncomfortable: RAM units down 60%, SSDs down 49%, servers down 25%. Buyers are paying far more for far less. Revenue growth of 75 to 85% across these categories looks impressive on a slide, but it is inflation doing the work, not demand.

The UK told this story clearly. Q2 2026 distribution revenue grew 6.2%, and business channels performed particularly well, with small and medium resellers up 10.8%. But disk storage revenue jumped 86.6% in June almost entirely on price, while unit demand actually fell. Consumers, meanwhile, kept buying laptops (mobile computing revenue up 14% in retail) while quietly avoiding peripherals and upgrades, with computing components down 23% and 32% in the same channel. People want the new machine, not the accessories around it.

France showed the same mechanism from a different angle. The market posted a 13.8% year-on-year revenue increase in Q2, second only to Spain among the top five European countries, and stayed above the Western European average of 10%. Yet the number of active resellers selling notebooks fell 10% and desktop resellers fell 18%, year on year. Mobile computing unit growth collapsed from 48% in Q1 to just 1% in Q2. Distributors are holding stock built up before anticipated price rises, and some are sitting on unsold lines as a result. Vendors are releasing marketing budget to help move it. The headline growth figure and the on-the-ground reality are not telling the same story.

Poland has been the standout market for weeks running, and it is not accidental. The country's National Digital Strategy, adopted in June, targets 100% of key public services being fully digital by 2030 and full fibre and 5G household coverage, with digitalisation spending set to reach 5% of GDP. Defence spending sits at 4.8% of planned GDP. Add Foxconn's new semiconductor and server plant near Wrocław, on land Intel walked away from in 2024, valued at $5 to 10 billion with a possible rise to $20 billion over the decade, and Poland's server revenue growth of nearly 300% year on year makes more sense. Spain and Italy, by contrast, are simply in their annual holiday lull; both countries traditionally go quiet until weeks 36 and 37, and nothing in the data suggests otherwise this year.

AMD's Helios platform deserves a mention, because it changes the competitive maths for AI infrastructure. Packing 72 GPUs and 18 CPUs into a rack built on open Ethernet rather than proprietary interconnects, it has already attracted commitments from Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic. AT&T reported an 80% drop in token processing costs after routing workloads to AMD hardware. For a market that has spent two years assuming Nvidia had no credible rival, that is a genuinely new variable.

Not every part of the channel is thriving on higher prices. CompTIA's refurbished PC index fell to 78 in Q2, its lowest since 2024, with unit sales down 24% quarter on quarter. Buyers there are trading down too, shifting from 16GB to 8GB configurations and from 512GB to 256GB storage, even as refurbished ASPs actually dropped 2% while new device prices rose 10%. It is a reminder that not everyone facing higher component costs simply pays them; plenty of buyers step back into a cheaper tier instead.

There was a smaller, sharper observation from the high street too. Walking through Currys, the MacBook Neo, running only a few points behind the MacBook Air in Apple notebook share, was found to have almost no floor presence, while the Air and Pro ran full interactive demos. Retailers appear to be using premium shelf space to defend margins rather than push the volume model that would sell itself anyway. Small detail, but it captures the wider mood of the channel this August: everyone protecting the number that matters most to them, even as the underlying demand quietly cools.

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