The 2013 All-America Research Team: Technology Supply Chain, No. 3: Brian Alexander

Brian Alexander advances from runner-up to third place. The Raymond James & Associates analyst, who is based in St. Petersburg, Florida, covers 20 companies and intends to add names as IPO activity warrants. “We are constructive on the information technology supply chain,” Alexander offers, because “global capital spending is poised to improve, and IT accounts for over 50 percent of capital spending.” Likely beneficiaries of this projected rally include companies in the components distribution, electronics manufacturing services and IT hardware industries, he notes. More broadly, slow growth combined with “concerns about alternative computing models — namely, the cloud,” he says, have driven valuations down across the space. But Alexander is optimistic that “public cloud migration will occur over multiple years, and this overhang will gradually ease, allowing for multiple expansion to continue across the sector,” he concludes. — Pam Baker