NEIL HARTIGAN

General Manager – UK and Ireland NEC Display Solutions

Neil Hartigan began his career as a footballer with Oxford United in the early seventies, however after three years this was curtailed by a knee injury and was forced to pursue his football career as a semi-professional. At this time he joined a subsidiary of Unilever to sell Office Equipment in the Home Counties. At the age of 24 he became one of the youngest managers to be appointed by Unilever in the UK.

In 1984 he joined a company called Formscan who sold specialist scanning and document management systems predominantly to the legal, finance and insurance sectors. He then joined Sharp Electronics in 1990 as Deputy General Manager where he amongst other product categories he had responsibility for the sales and marketing of Sharp projectors Following spells with Unisys and Xerox where he managed territories such as the Middle East. North Africa and the Balkans he joined Epson as UK Sales and Marketing Manager for the B2B sector.

During his time with Epson he enjoyed great success in the projector market with a number one market share position. This was due to the creation of a UK specific education range which pre-empted the Becta initiative in 2002 and was fully adopted by the UK most influential education channel partner. In parallel to this a specialist AV partner group was formed which offered far more focus on the higher end and more lucrative segment of the Epson projector range. In 2004 he was awarded the Epson employee of the year award.

Following a brief spell of playing golf and socialising in Spain he came back in February 2008 to join NEC as Channel Director. Since joining NEC the AV sector has evolved enormously with huge emphasis now placed on vertical market focus and solution sales. He has great belief in channel integrity and ethics. The channel still relies hugely on relationships and trust is a big factor in ensuring that these relationships are long term. In 2013 he was named as “AV Sales Professional of the year” by AV News and was presented with the award at that years ISE conference in Amsterdam. in 2015 he was promoted to General Manager for UK and Ireland.