Electronic Specifier Design Magazine, January 2024: Wireless & Memory
Customer order backlog levels reported by ecsn’s manufacturer authorised distributor members reached unprecedented heights in 2022, a trend that looks likely to slowly reverse in 2023 due to improving customer confidence and declining components manufacturer lead-times.
The forecast predicts that the UK & Ireland electronic components market will continue its modest growth in the first half of 2023, returning ‘Billings’ (Sales Revenues) growth of between 0%-to-6.3%, with a mid-point growth of around 3.5%. In the second half, the association predicts that ‘Billings’ will slow modestly in the range (4%)-to-3% to give an outcome for the full year in the range (2%)-to-4.9% and showing a mid-point of 2.8% growth over the previous year.
Customers in Europe and the USA have increasingly turned to Grey Market Brokers who have been able to source semiconductors from Asia in large volumes to satisfy customer demand, albeit at highly inflated prices. ecsn members believe that semiconductor manufacturers must increase their capability to manage their global inventory, particularly in Asia. They must be able to exercise effective control over when, where and to whom their product is shipped, re-directing it as necessary to serve real customer demand and not the ‘phantom’ demand created by organisations seeking to exploit failures in the market.
Demand outstripped the ability of component manufacturers to supply in 2021 driving a steep change in average lead-times that jumped to over 26 weeks plus.
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Paige West, Managing Editor
