For the past six months, the Electronic Components Industry Association (ECIA) has been in a state of flux. For the procurement community, that became evident though changes to ECIAauthorized, the association’s inventory-aggregation site. In October, some of ECIA’s biggest members – global distributors Arrow Electronics Inc., Avnet Inc. and Electrocomponents plc—left the trade association to…
All over the world, healthcare workers face a critical supply shortage of personal protection equipment (PPE) which prevents cross-contamination between caregivers and patients. Life-saving ventilators are in short supply. It’s inconceivable that in 2020, the richest country in the world cannot produce enough masks, gowns, shields and equipment in response to the Covid-19 pandemic for…
The Covid-19 pandemic and oil-market volatility drove the U.S. manufacturing index back into contraction territory in March, as the Institute for Supply Management’s PMI fell to 49.1 from 50.1 the prior month. With 50.0 as the line of demarcation between contraction and growth, new orders at 42.2 percent and employment, at 43.8, are at the…
In the past several weeks, EPSNews and our sister publications at Aspencore Media have been inundated with information, resources and commentary on the coronavirus, or Covid-19. We can’t do justice to every item, so we’ve set aside a section where we can post updates, reports, commentaries and press releases. Some of the content is outside…
Trade show postponements have become standard operating procedure during the Covid-19 outbreak, and rightly so. Last week’s cancellation of the Electronic Distribution Show (EDS) also qualifies as historic. The show has been around in one form or another since the 1930s and has suspended assembly only during World War II. EDS was scheduled for May…
The reality of Covid-19 has settled into the electronics supply chain as shipment delays, labor shortages and flight cancellations have upended global logistics. Although the tech industry has improved supply chain resilience, new technologies are gaining traction as the coronavirus spreads. The previous weeks have focused on Chinese supply as manufacturing slowly recovered across the…
Electronic component manufacturers (OCMs) and their OEM/EMS customers say they don’t have much visibility into their partners’ supply chains. During the coronavirus outbreak, that visibility may determine how quickly the electronics industry bounces back from a prolonged China shutdown. A survey the ECIA conducted on Feb. 7 found a majority of OCMs didn’t know how…
U.S. factory activity declined in February as new orders contracted and concerns about coronavirus-related supply chain disruption spread across industries. The Institute for Supply Management’s PMI is clinging to expansion at 50.1 percent, down from 50.9 percent in January. Fifty is the line of demarcation between expansion and contraction. “Coronavirus is wreaking havoc on the…
It’s been more than six weeks since the first death from China’s coronavirus — Covid-19 — epidemic was reported in the city of Wuhan. It has since claimed lives in other nations and remains a global epidemic which, as of February 19, had killed 2,000 people, all but a handful of them in China. Remarkably, the global…
Despite logistical, packaging and test challenges related to the coronavirus (now known as Covid-19), chip fabs located in China are continuing to function normally with high capacity rates, according to Omdia. The semiconductor industry appears to have escaped the direct impact of the Covid-19 crisis so far, but the market is likely to suffer the…