The Asia-Pacific region — now an epicenter of electronics — is at widely varying points on its journey through the COVID-19 pandemic. China is broadly beginning to restart its operations amid recovering domestic demand, while other geographies, such as Southeast Asia, Japan, and South Korea, are still tackling cases and under a range of control…
Supplier realignment always causes stress in the electronics supply chain — but the past six weeks has moved the needle to “anxiety.” In early October, chip maker Texas Instruments announced it was dropping six of its distributors — including Avnet Inc., WPG and WT Microelectronics — by the end of 2020. Within the past week…
As component manufacturers and distributors gathered for the annual EDS trade show, fears of a 2019 recession had largely abated. The year could end slightly ahead of 2018, one global distributor projected, assuming the market environment remains “normal.” That was Wednesday. By Friday, the U.S. had escalated its trade war with China and the supply…
Anyone familiar with Foxconn/Hon Hai Precision Industry retained a healthy dose of skepticism when Foxconn announced it would build advanced liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) in Wisconsin. To put it charitably, Foxconn is not renowned for honoring its contracts. More than 20 years ago, when I was working for Electronic Business magazine, one of our editors spent…
RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc (LSE:ECM), the global distributor for engineers, has announced the recent appointment of Frank Lee as Regional Vice President, Asia Pacific, who will lead and advance the strategic growth initiatives for RS in Asia Pacific. The appointment supports the region’s commitment to be the leading one-stop solution provider offering products from industrial to electronics,…
Avnet (NYSE: AVT), a leading global technology distributor, announced today that it will be merging its distribution centres in to one new facility to increase productivity efficiency and speed-to-delivery. The new modern mega facility will consolidate Avnet’s distribution centres in Hong Kong and Shenzhen from four to one. The varied locations came about due to past acquisitions.…
Andy King has been president of Arrow Electronics Inc.’s global components business for a little over six months, half a year or two fiscal quarters. Calendar 2015 was a year the electronics distribution industry was happy to put in its rear-view mirror. According to the EPSNews Top 50 Distributors report, the North American franchised distribution industry grew…
The electronics industry — in fact, most industries — acknowledge that the supply chain must be resilient. In order to accomplish this, however, businesses themselves have to have resilience embedded in their infrastructure and practices. But only 29 percent of CEOs polled by the British Standards Institution (BSI) and The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) believe they…
Temperature sensors, in a word, will remain “hot” in North America and Europe. Thanks to demand from both the industrial and consumer market segments, sales of temperature sensors are expected to grow at a decent clip in those regions through 2020. In Europe, the market is expected to increase to $1.36 billion by 2018, with…
The announcement is vaguely reminiscent of the 1990s: A successful distributor in its domestic market is duplicating its model overseas. This time, however, it’s a European company establishing itself in the U.S. Rutronik Elektronische Bauelemente GmbH, founded in 1973 in Ispringen, Germany, has opened its U.S. headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. (See facts and figures, below.) Its…