COVER STORY
To boldly innovate… T
By Steve Rawlins, CEO, Anglia
he electronics industry is highly cyclical. Anyone who has been around for a few years will have seen at least one set of peaks and troughs; those of us who are kindly referred to as ‘industry veterans’ will have experienced five, six or even seven such swings. The good news is that if you look at the picture over three years rather than year-on-year, the graph is always healthily ‘up and to the right’. Increased sales and revenue. We’ve all become so used to this that when things started to look a bit fragile after the post-Covid, EV-fuelled boom years, the wise heads said, ‘OK, we’ll be back on track by 2024’. By mid 2024, any talk of recovery had been pushed back to mid 2025, but the figures this year have still been poor.
Honestly, I think this has been one of the worst slumps I’ve ever experienced – it’s been deep and long. Yet I still don’t class it as a recession. I believe that panic and a false dawning of the EV market led to massive over- supply of components. And the slowness of the economy has led to a huge excess of inventory in the channel. This has taken much longer to burn through than expected, hence all the poor numbers and apparent market shrinkage. However, I do believe that as we move into 2026, the excess inventory has now largely been used up, and we are about to switch again from feast to famine. You can’t just turn a fab line on and have ICs ready to ship the next day. This is painfully obvious to anyone who is familiar with the process but let me just remind others: semiconductor manufacturing time is often measured in months, depending on the complexity of the device. That’s assuming there is fab capacity in the first place. Setting up a new facility or getting one out of mothballs also takes time.
We are already seeing leadtimes extending, and it’s not just complex chips that will soon be hard to find on anything approaching manageable delivery periods. Bellwether parts such as tantalum capacitors and SOT 23-packaged discretes are starting to flag up as ’difficult’. So, our message to buyers is clear: get your forward orders in now. You will not be able to place a volume order and receive it immediately as has been the case for the last three years. Good distributors will flex quantities and delivery times as much as they can to meet changing OEM demands, but if you’ve nothing on order, you will be left out in the cold.
But we are positive about the coming period. For Anglia, 2025 was a difficult year because, as well as the cyclical malaise, one of our major long-term manufacturing partners
10 December/January 2026
decided to cut us and several other distributors across Europe in order to try to squeeze more profit from the big fulfilment distributors who are now working on margins as low as 3 per cent. At first glance, buyers may think ‘not my problem’. They’d be wrong. Distributors are much more than middle- men – or they should be. They offer a number of services in support of the component itself – design-in help, favourable credit terms, immediate supply of samples for prototyping, available inventory including dev tools, kanban, kitting etc. If you are only making 3 per cent you can’t afford field applications engineers (FAEs) or to hold inventory. At 3 per cent you can be nothing more than a logistics operation. We know of customers who tell us that the big three or four leading distributors won’t visit a customer unless they are spending at least £200k. The UK market and across the EU is dominated by SMEs. If the big semiconductor houses continue to slash their distribution channels, the end result for the customer is a lack of choice, which can only be a bad thing. Faced with a significant contraction in our business on top of the generally poor outlook, Anglia did what we always do, we innovate and find other solutions. Steps we took at the end of 2023 to broaden our market with the expansion of Anglia Live – our online portal – into the EU as well as the UK
Components in Electronics
and Ireland are really starting to pay off. As a reminder, the Anglia Live web portal opened for EU customers in January of 2024, providing a one- or two-day delivery service for customers in mainland Europe, with parts shipped Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) from Anglia’s UK distribution centre via FedEx’s Paris hub. Competitive pricing is offered in multiple currencies coupled with ex-stock availability across a wide inventory of semiconductor, passive and electromechanical products. Orders placed up to 17:00 CET Monday to Thursday are despatched the same day. There is no minimum order value, and delivery is free for orders over €50/$60. Looking at the way the market is developing, I believe that distributors who are limited geographically to a small territory such as the UK or any other single European country will probably not survive in the long term. We saw this coming and acted fast. It helps to have the flexibility of a large in-house IT department, so we can bring activities like this on-stream quickly. Not only have we been rewarded by an increasing customer base, our existing franchises have recognised our efforts and we have won major awards from STMicroelectronics (ST) and Digi. Explaining the reasons why ST named us for ‘Top Sales & Customer Excellence Recognition’, ST said: “Anglia
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