Why are so many components "not in stock" in Farnell?

Hello
Does anyone know what’s going on with Farnell UK these days?
Hardly anything is in stock. It wasn’t like this a decade ago. Even 100nF , 50V, X7R, 0603 ceramics weren’t available the other day…at least not in quantities of less than 50. This is ridiculous.
We are trying to get components together to build a 60W offline led driver, but nothing is in stock.
Digikey and Mouser is much better, but attracts a £15 shipping cost to UK, and my company won’t pay that. –Specially since the unit is merely a demo unit, since we can’t compete on price with the led drivers available from the huge electronics corporations such as Samsung, Osram, Philips etc etc.
RS is just as bad.
Are there any other vendors around? Our lack of availability to compete on price with led drivers from the major corporations means we have to play on a shoestring budget….all the time.

This seems to be a general issue with capacitor availability since last summer already. My customers have reported similar issues for their products (large quantities), with delivery times of 3+ months for simple standard components.

But if there is a supplier with stock for prototyping, what is the cost of an engineer who can't do his job because his boss saves £15 on shipping cost? It's time for a new job, based on all your past issues with this wonderful company.

Treez. you continue to post the most clueless, whiny posts. Buy the 50 capacitors, it will cost you about US$2.00. I don't know what that is in farthings, you figure it out.

I order from Aliexpress for my prototypes, it takes 15 days and very cheap.

Hi,

RS is just as bad how? They charge a pittance for delivery for hobbyist orders and I'm not sure now of precise figures, but it's literally next to nothing or in fact nothing at all for orders whose value exceeds an embarrassingly low amount of purchases for companies big and small.

Both the UK and the Spanish branches seldom had much out of stock, maybe one or two items out of an order of twenty, and most times with suitable near-identical replacement parts, especially capacitors.

I just can't agree with you, that certainly hasn't been my experience. The worst RS oblige me to do is buy large packs I will never use for a dodgy prototype or seek an alternative drop-in part. I will cherish my dusty pack of 25 PDIP CD4049s and the 25 CD40471s until my dying day because I doubt I'll use them, I only needed about three of each IC

Did you get in a temper today because you couldn't complete an order you had in mind and posted this thread in anger?

Anyway, good luck with whatever you're doing.

You can check a site like octopart that will show you stock levels for a bunch of distributors or go the manufacturer of the part you are looking for and search their distributor list. Sometimes they have distributor stock levels too. You also have to figure out which distributors sell to which markets. I think of the Element 13 companies as being a little more electromechanical and industrial controls guys. They aren't as big on surface mount parts as digikey and mouser.

For real time pricing and comparison there is also designfast.com that carries data from direct data sources and also MFG data on around 70+ distributors.

Lots of complaining about capacitor shortages, in the press.

But generally these distributors operate to maximize return
on held inventory, which means keeping inventory to an
acceptable minimum (and acceptable may be different
when you're a $1B/yr company vs some "I'll take seven
pieces" hobbyist). This is what they call "allocation".

I got an information from our supplier regarding this issue. All the major capacitor manufacturers are stopped their production purposely to create demand and to increase the price. Specifically 0.1µF capacitors. Now we are buying capacitors with nearly 500% price.

RS is just as bad how? They charge a pittance for delivery for hobbyist orders

Click to expand...

Thanks, i always find that RS deliver via DHL….and if you are not in when they call to deliver then the shipment goes back to their depot……if you keep ordering then they just stop delivering because they don’t like holding stuff at the depot.
Are there any electronics component companys that deliver via Royal Mail in UK?
I know Cricklewood electronics do but they don’t stock as much as farnell/RS

Hi treez,

When I was in the UK, three years ago, RS deliveries consistently came with Royal Mail in one town and probably a courier service in another which worked for Royal Mail, from what my aged mind can recollect. Maybe it's changed.

No chance of receiving the deliveries at work/where you will be during the day?

Hi,

Received this link in an email today, it's almost advertising dressed up as an article about overcoming the MLCC shortage with things like polymer (deduce they are gathering dust on shelves...). Might be interesting to see the comparison charts and when to use what.

How to Survive the MLCC Shortage

If all else fails, no doubt there's a surplus of extortionate silver mica, at 4.7nF max and the size of a strawberry...