Trends for 2022 from Solid State Supplies

1. What achievements come to mind when reflecting on 2021?

Counting high amongst this year’s successes is the acquisition of Willow Technologies, a successful business operating in the electro-mechanical arena with a tremendous and highly knowledgeable workforce. This, when combined with the AEC acquisition in the USA (AEC was a subsidiary of Willow), is giving us a foothold in both Europe and the USA. It is allowing us to carefully expand our influence outside of the UK and strengthen our position in the EV, energy storage and other markets.

There are certain elements that make a value-added distributor successful and not least of these is the relationship that the distributor has with its suppliers. It’s this relationship that allows us to get things done, to keep customers up to date with the latest developments and to get answers to problems if and when they occur. The strength of the relationships that Solid State Supplies holds with its suppliers is exemplified by the two awards given to us by Excelitas this year.

One of these was in recognition of the outstanding business efforts by an individual employee and the other recognised the work of the whole sales team in developing new opportunities for Excelitas with the ‘highest quarter on quarter growth’ of any distributor in their network. Particularly pleasing is the fact that these awards recognise the work done since the integration of Pacer Components into Solid State Supplies.

It’s great to know our suppliers appreciate us but the way in which we treat the society around us speaks volumes to the culture of our company. This year has seen the entire Solid State PLC group really embrace its social responsibilities by sponsoring foodbanks local to each of our operations and indeed sponsoring accommodation for young people close to our headquarters in Redditch. This is in addition to our now annual ‘walk the length of England’ fundraiser that gets all of our staff involved in doing their bit to raise money.

2. What major issues have you had to contend with during 2021?

The impact of COVID-19 created a number of challenges to doing business this past year. We experienced staffing shortages with employees isolating but, despite this, we’ve managed to keep our offices open and keep our warehouse and value-added centres running at full strength throughout the year. And most importantly, we’ve protected our incredible staff. The people that work for us give me a real sense of pride and I’m grateful for their exemplary work ethic in challenging times to support our customers.

Like every other electronic component company, we have been affected by global supply chain shortages which, combined with foreign exchange headwinds at revenue level, have caused issues for us and many other distributors. We’re seeing not only semiconductors but also raw materials moving to a shortage position. I don’t foresee this situation resolving before the end of 2022 and possibly not before mid-2023 but there have been a number of announcements of additional capacity being planned and started which does give cause for some optimism.

As a distributor, we are able to over order where we can to meet demand and hold buffer stock. Any customers that placed long term orders earlier on are seeing the benefit of this. We’re making sure that we keep our customers informed about the situation. In many cases, customers have been forced to look at designing in alternative devices that are in less short supply than others, and indeed to give a second chance to their sourcing and procurement groups. Our application engineers are well placed to help as we know which devices are more readily available and can give valuable advice. For example, when considering microprocessors, we know what software changes are needed to allow a replacement part to function in the application.

3. What trends can we expect to see in 2022?

Many industrial and commercial operations are migrating to 4G LTE or 5G technology. So, the transition to a fully digital system is happening as the PTSN network is replaced with fibre or cellular solutions.

The pandemic has caused many of our customers to talk to us about remote monitoring and predictive maintenance applications to reduce instances of human interaction. Many applications can benefit from the advantages of 5G and health & safety applications can now move to cellular connectivity due to the latency improvements of 5G.

Organisations are moving computing power to the edge as there are more available solutions that can deliver the additional power needed. Another interesting area is video analytics as more companies move over to AI-based systems including facial recognition in applications like security systems.

4. How will technology impact on sustainability?

We have been seeing for quite a while that more and more of our customers are looking to both reduce their power requirements and adopt newer, more sustainable sources of power such as small photovoltaic (PV) panels. Of course, PV panels aren’t suitable for all of our customers’ applications so there’s a drive to use more power-efficient components and design devices that can carry out the same function as previous generations of devices, but that use or waste far less power than before.