Review on component distributionin South Africa

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16 Feb 2000 News

Albert Kopp

The past year saw a major shift in the supply and demand of components in the industry. Up until about mid-year most electronic components were freely available on relatively short lead times. This has been the case for the past 2-3 years. Very swiftly from mid-year onwards, the situation changed, with lead times rapidly extending and many suppliers announcing that their components were on allocation. Interestingly enough, it was passive components that seemed to fare worst in the lead time stakes. Sawfilters were almost unavailable. This was driven mainly by the telecommunications market and cellular telephony market in particular. This situation will extend well into the year 2000.

Globally, the component distribution industry continued to see a consolidation of distributors with Avnet taking the lead in completing the largest ever acquisition in the distribution industry by taking over Marshall Industries in the US and SEI and Macro in Europe.

In South Africa, customers are more and more following global trends in reducing their number of vendors and demanding value-add services from their distributors. The new buzz-word in the industry is 'supply chain management', a field in which Avnet has the clear lead. Especially in times of component shortages it is essential for local manufacturers to engage in long-term relationships with their component suppliers, ie the local distributors, to ensure that components are available when they are needed. Short-term purchasing relationships by and large cannot achieve this goal or at substantially higher cost.

For Avnet Kopp the year was an eventful one starting off with the launch of two major lines, namely Texas Instruments (TI) and AMP, and culminating in being awarded the International Rectifier (IR) franchise at year-end which was launched in January 2000. Avnet Kopp has refined its value-add proposition to customers with its integrated material services (IMS) and its POURS software point of use replenishment system. With the year ending on such a positive note we are confident that this trend will continue well into the year 2000.

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