Fidelity, the investment fund manager, has bought 255,000 shares in Compel, taking its holding in UK's third biggest reseller up to 2,526,858 - 8.14 per cent of the company. It notified Compel of the purchase in a letter dated 5 January. We guess that Fidelity reckons that somewhere there is a buyer waiting for Compel.

Today's FT carries an ad for VLSI, touting for sale the 'historically profitable' component distie's business and assets. The ad reveals that VLSI's turnover for the 18 months to September end, 2000 was c.£172 million. The distie continues to trade "as normal", Simon Thomas, joint receiver at Howarth Clarke Whitehill, told MicroScope.

The channel rag has pored over the accounts of VLSI and IMC, the first distie failures of 2001. For the year ended March 1999, VLSI turned over nearly £88 million and (made) pre-tax profits of £918,000. However, the components distie "owed a factoring company, believed to be Capital Bank Finance, more than £4 million at a company level".

Doesn't look like there'll be too much of IMC to sell - the bust scanner distie owes up to £4 million to unsecured creditors, most of the 17 staff have already been laid off, and there's only a small amount of stock to sell, according to Andrew Stoneman of Kroll Buchler Phillips, who is handling IMC's receivership, as reported by MicroScope. ®