Template Tools
| Components Currently Are Short |
| Monday, 05 July 2010 13:59 |
Except possibly in consumer wireless, enduser demand in the continuing recession is not enough to logically create shortages. Computers and mobile phone sales are up 10-20% because of demand from Asia, but other sectors are not growing that fast in our economically troubled time. There are clearly shortages of many components along the supply chain, but it's hard to know how much of that is over-ordering for protection. Production levels are strong and most delivery commitments are being met. Those who want additional quantities often must wait two to six additional weeks, however.
This story was inspired by Rick Pierson's report "Severe Shortages Impact Key Commodity Components." Rick is with iSuppli, a reliable analyst firm, and his findings correspond to what I'm hearing informally. " Across the board, lead times are longer than forecasts indicated a month ago. The lead time in June was 20 weeks for power MOSFETs and small signal transistors, and 18 weeks for bipolar power devices and rectifiers.availability remains extremely tight for widely used analog Integrated Circuits (IC) and memory ICs. The supply situation is even more critical for standard logic ICs and power management discretes such as low-voltage MOSFETs and tantalum capacitors, which now are experiencing shortages and effectively are on allocation status.
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) reports worldwide sales in May were $24.7 billion, a sequential increase of 4.5 percent from April when sales were $23.6 billion.
That's a year-on-year increase of 47.6 percent from May 2009, when orders were exceptionally low because of fear of financial collapse. For the whole year George Scalise predicts 28.4 percent growth. Part of that 28% growth is price increases, so the effective unit growth is significantly lower. A 10-20% underlying growth rate should not be causing shortages this severe so much of this is probably companies protecting themselves by over ordering. That is unproven and is little consolation for companies that can't ship orders because they can't get parts.
|
| Last Updated on Tuesday, 06 July 2010 12:56 |