Distributors are openly warning that the beginnings of an upturn in the electronics industry is raising once again the specter of potential over-ordering, resulting in extended lead-times for electronic components.

Chris McAneny, Northern European marketing director at Arrow, says an upturn in the U.S. and Asia has started and Europe is expected to follow. "Increased global demand is already pushing out lead times, while some manufacturers are raising their prices to reflect hardening market conditions," said McAneny.

The passives and electromechancial distributor Avnet Time has gone further and asked for more realistic ordering from customers because, as it pointed out, "without this there is the obvious, but potentially catastrophic, consequence that components will not be delivered on time, order quantities will not be met or that recommended alternative products turn out to be unsuitable for their intended use."

¡°Buyers are now purchasing larger volumes and are scheduling their orders with us further in advance in anticipation that availability might become limited at some point in the future," says Darren Poulton, marketing director at Avnet Time.

According to Glyn Dennehy, VP sales and marketing at TTI Europe, changes to lead-times can be best described as "spotty" rather than universal. "An example is high capacitance ceramic capacitors. But also on some of the more commodity type passive products, such as MLCCs, suppliers in general have either given us formal notification of lead-times moving out by two to four weeks, or that is what we are experiencing," says Dennehy.

Dennehy says that TTI has modified internal lead-times on all products by several weeks depending on experience and what the distributor is being advised by its vendors. "That means that we are ordering more products several weeks earlier than we have been previously," says Dennehy.

On the positive side Dennehy said the European market is quite predictable with Q1 usually very strong as customers make their decisions about product plans and the suppliers they will use in November and December.

"We experienced that last year, and so we began increasing our inventories and demands on suppliers by more than 20 percent as early as September and October 2003," added Dennehy.  

By: DocMemory
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