Front End | Electronic Components Supply Network European electronic components market – Q2 ’25 overview
First the good news: Inventories across the entire global electronic components supply network are being consumed and ‘Bookings’ (New Orders) are increasing in most geographic markets. According to Adam Fletcher, chairman of the Electronic Components Supply Network (ecsn), this positivity was reflected somewhat in European electronic components markets in Q2 ’25 but the overall performance in Europe remains lacklustre and the UK is falling behind on ‘Bookings’. He cautions “given the extended lead-times that components manufacturers are currently quoting, and the price rises we know are in the pipeline, UK system integrators (customers)
need to take urgent action to secure their future material requirements”. T
he graphic “2nd Quarter 2025 Total Components – Booking, Billing & Book to Bill Ratio” (courtesy of the International
Distributors of Electronics Association) best read from left to right, provides a snapshot of our industry’s performance in European markets over the last twelve calendar quarters. It’s apparent that the trend is up, but has some way to go to return to 2022 levels.
The blue bars show European “Billings” (revenue from sales shipped and invoiced), which from Q2’22 grew for four consecutive quarters, peaking in Q1’23, before declining in the following seven quarters. Growth returned briefly in Q1 this year but declined again in the second quarter.
The brown bars show European “Bookings” (Net New Sales Entered), which declined in Q2’22 and continued to decline for ten consecutive quarters, returning to (low) growth in Q1’25 before declining again in the last reported quarter. In the last three months of 2021 (not included in the graphic) the Book- to-Bill (B2B) ratio peaked at 1.66:1, a simply outrageous number and beyond anything recorded in the past forty years but contracted to 1.33:1 in Q2’22, then to 1.06:1 in the next quarter. The B2B continued to contract over the following five quarters before gradually returning towards unity. The shape of the B2B curve over the last two years is indicative of a steadily improving trend in Europe (albeit on declining Billings) but until a steady B2B ratio of 1.05:1 returns we simply can’t claim that any real growth has returned in our markets.
Current performance by sector The only technology market sector in Europe able to report any real growth is Hyperscale Computing (AI), which is in turn driving demand for a long tail of supporting electronic
12 September 2025
components essential in complex power, infrastructure and interconnect applications. AI is also encouraging growth in the semiconductor market, but only in regard to a very small number of very specific, very high value devices such as graphic processing units (GPUs) and high bandwidth memory. The lead times for these devices continues to hover around twenty-six plus weeks. Given the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Middle East and Africa it’s no surprise that the global Aerospace and Defence sector is reporting growth, but this market accounts for less than 5 per cent of the revenue derived from total world-wide sales of electronic components. The huge increase in demand for the specialised devices required by this sector is severely impacting the fulfilment of military
Components in Electronics
contracts by pushing average lead-times for mil-spec components out to forty plus weeks. The biggest driver in our industry remains mobile phones and associated infrastructure (> 60 per cent) but here too growth is disappointing, with the sector struggling to stay out of negative territory. Local country telecom providers are locking customers into much longer-term contracts, typically twenty-four months plus and anecdotal evidence suggests that consumers are finding few compelling reasons to upgrade their existing handsets. Both factors have the effect of lengthening the replacement cycle, although from an environmental perspective that’s probably not a bad thing. The lead-times for the very high volumes of advanced electronic components required
by the telecom sector remains at twenty weeks plus.
The global automotive market looks to be returning to growth, particularly with regard to plug-in vehicles. The post COVID inventory overhang in the global automotive market appears to have been ‘cleansed’ and consumed. Asia in particular is reporting a boom in sales of EVs but the overall automotive market in the US is surprisingly flat. The market for automotive components in Europe is also down, probably close to 15 per cent and lead- times have extended to an average of eighteen plus weeks. Some outliers, principally specific simple microcontrollers are running at thirty plus weeks.
In common with most developed countries European Industrial / Medical markets continue
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