Front End | Electronic Components Supply Network
European electronic components market – Q4 ’25 overview
Q4’25 saw electronic components markets throughout Europe maintaining the overdue recovery trajectory: ‘Bookings’ (new customer orders entered) continued to grow, but at a rate that accelerated beyond the most optimistic expectations, while ‘Billings’ (invoiced shipments to customers) remained ‘flat’. Commenting on the Q4’25 results Adam Fletcher, chairman of the Electronic Components Supply Network (ecsn) and the International Distributors of Electronics Association (IDEA), said: “The fear is that the current ‘Bookings’ growth trend might begin to spiral out of control as panic buying returns.”
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here are always leading and lagging indicators in any market recovery and surprisingly in the first three quarters of 2025,
demand for passive components was the leading indicator, whilst semiconductors (normally leading the charge) trailed in second place. The situation changed dramatically in Q4’25 as the lead-time for specific “merchant market, commodity memory products” particularly DRAM and FLASH extended from eighteen to forty plus weeks over a very short time. So, whilst the semiconductor ‘Bookings’ have increased dramatically it will be a long time, probably Q3’25, before the ‘Billings’ catch up. The IDEA European Statistical Analysis graphic “4th Quarter 2025 Total Components – Booking, Billing & Book to Bill Ratio”, (best read from left to right) provides a useful snapshot of the Q4‘25 position.
The blue bars in the graphic illustrate European ‘Billings’ (revenue from sales shipped and invoiced), Q1’25 saw a brief return to growth, but it faded again in the second quarter and remained essentially ‘flat’ in Q3 and Q4.
The brown bars show European ‘Bookings’ (net new sales entered), which continued a generally downward trajectory for seven consecutive quarters. Low growth briefly returned in Q4’24 and Q1’25 before declining once again in the following quarter. Growth was essentially ‘flat’ in Q3 but it leapt up in Q4’25.
Book to Bill (B2B) ratio The B2B continued to contract for four quarters before very gradually improving. It finally regained unity (1:1) in Q3’25 but then increased dramatically to 1.22:1 in Q4’25. The general shape of the B2B curve
over the last two years is indicative of a steadily improving business trend in Europe (albeit on declining Billings) but a steady and positive B2B around 1.05:1 would have been preferable as it would indicate the return of manageable, real growth to our market.
Semiconductor booking activity in Europe
The general level of economic activity throughout Europe remains weak, a situation reflected in the poor ‘Billings’ results reported by all participants in European electronic components markets. Almost all customers in Europe (and around the world) are however placing much more forward order cover on their suppliers to protect their organisation’s supply network position. The IDEA graphic “4th Quarter 2025 Semiconductor – Booking, Trend
12 March 2026 Components in Electronics
Graphic S2” (again, best read from left to right) clearly shows that customers in the UK are not following their peers in competing European nations and are failing to place additional order cover with their semiconductor suppliers.
Spooked by HBM demand? All the indicators suggest that there is sufficient semiconductor capacity available to the market to enable modest low single digit growth in 2026, but probably only just! My personal intuition is that the semiconductor market has been ‘spooked’ by the unrelenting demand for the huge volumes of primarily High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) required to support growth in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. High profit margins are encouraging the three dominant HBM manufacturers
www.cieonline.co.uk
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