A company representative told CRN: "I can confirm that at around midday today Steljes Ltd went into administration."
Despite attempts to cut costs and keep the business going, the decision by Steljes' biggest vendor SMART to appoint another distributor and start supplying resellers directly seems to have been the final straw.
"The administration was a required consequence of the business failing to meet the profit it needed to service, which was a consequence of us moving from a value to a volume model for our largest vendor SMART," the company told CRN.
Steljes Ltd has appointed Alix Partners as the insolvency practice looking to find a buyer for all, or parts, of the business.
A spokeswoman for Alix Partners told What Hi-Fi? that the administration will not affect other parts of the business such as Steljes Rental. We contacted subsidiary Steljes Audio for comment on the situation and how it affects its part of the operation. For now, we are told, Steljes Audio is not in administration and "continues to trade as normal".
Audio/video specialist Steljes, founded by Nigel Steljes nearly 30 years ago and based in Bagshot, had an operating loss of £1.28m in the year to June 2015 on sales of £53.8m.
Steljes Audio was formed as a division of Steljes Ltd at the beginning of this year, and is run by James Roth - a former shareholder in Roth Audio. It has a range of nine products: a trio of powered stereo speaker systems; two soundbars; two radios; a streaming adapter and a stereo amplifier.
All new products in the Steljes Audio range were due on sale in April. We will update this story as soon as we get more information.
[source: CRN]
