How is Chipageddon affecting you?

[VK3DRB]

Has anyone ordered parts from Digikey's Marketplace vendors? I haven't, but there seems to be many of them and the prices are generally low. However I suspect the delivery might be slower than normal and the buyer incurs extra shipping costs because they are shipped from the vendor, not Digikey. Rochester Electronics seems to be prominent... any good?

[harerod]

... Rochester Electronics seems to be prominent... any good?

For delivery to Germany, free shipping doesn't apply to Rochester Electronics. In addition to another ~US$40 for shipment expect "handling fees" from the carrier plus duty. I can't tell you more at this point, since I am still waiting for the additional charges. (in short - different INCOTERMS)

Since Digikey was playing their (German?) customers last week, by adjusting the quoted price about 10% upwards upon placing the goods into the shopping cart, plus stocks being of a general volatile nature, I got cautious myself. Whenever my cart exceeded minimum free shipping, which was no problem, because I shopped for several kiloDollars, I hit "checkout". So we got more than half a dozen parcels from Digikey over the course of three days. One was the Rochester parcel, which has an additional duty sticker attached.

The "flexible pricing" lasted for about a day. I could flog myself because I haven't done a screenshot. However - I had advertised price still on screen and higher price in the shopping cart. This behabvior was shown for several ST and TI parts. My colleague in procurement told me that the situation had been cleared the next day. Prices were constant, albeit even higher than the 10% surcharge that I had seen the day before.

[tom66]

I suspect the likes of WinSource will end up being bag holders sooner or later - you can't buy millions of $ of stock and sit on it forever.  When inventories at companies fill up, Digi-Key and  the likes will start bringing parts back into stock and at market prices, not 10x.  No one will want to buy from WS, etc., at 10x the price and they'll lose money even selling at cost because storage ain't free.

[Kasper]

Another shipping fiasco.  I made an order from mcmaster-carr the other day.  They emailed me to say:

Due to the cost and complexity of shipping our products to Canada, we are only able to accept orders from businesses and schools. We’ve canceled your order. If this material is not for personal use, please resubmit your order online using the business or school name.

This order was for business    I've made at least 10 orders from them on the same account for the same business.

3DHubs went this direction a while ago too.  Used to be able to make low cost orders, now any order less than $100 gets rounded up to $100.

[SilverSolder]

... Rochester Electronics seems to be prominent... any good?

For delivery to Germany, free shipping doesn't apply to Rochester Electronics. In addition to another ~US$40 for shipment expect "handling fees" from the carrier plus duty. I can't tell you more at this point, since I am still waiting for the additional charges. (in short - different INCOTERMS)

Since Digikey was playing their (German?) customers last week, by adjusting the quoted price about 10% upwards upon placing the goods into the shopping cart, plus stocks being of a general volatile nature, I got cautious myself. Whenever my cart exceeded minimum free shipping, which was no problem, because I shopped for several kiloDollars, I hit "checkout". So we got more than half a dozen parcels from Digikey over the course of three days. One was the Rochester parcel, which has an additional duty sticker attached.

The "flexible pricing" lasted for about a day. I could flog myself because I haven't done a screenshot. However - I had advertised price still on screen and higher price in the shopping cart. This behabvior was shown for several ST and TI parts. My colleague in procurement told me that the situation had been cleared the next day. Prices were constant, albeit even higher than the 10% surcharge that I had seen the day before.

This is what's known as "Transitory Inflation"...     and if you believe that, the Brooklyn Bridge is only a click away from your cart! 

[IDEngineer]

This is what's known as "Transitory Inflation"...     and if you believe that, the Brooklyn Bridge is only a click away from your cart! 

Another awesome quote from an EEVblog member. Seriously, the humor content here is as good as the technical content! 

[Kasper]

Another shipping fiasco.  I made an order from mcmaster-carr the other day.  They emailed me to say:

Due to the cost and complexity of shipping our products to Canada, we are only able to accept orders from businesses and schools. We’ve canceled your order. If this material is not for personal use, please resubmit your order online using the business or school name.

This order was for business    I've made at least 10 orders from them on the same account for the same business.

3DHubs went this direction a while ago too.  Used to be able to make low cost orders, now any order less than $100 gets rounded up to $100.

To top it off, they didn't contact me before cancelling, or push my order back to my cart, they just deleted it so now I have to look the parts up over again.

[Kasper]

I suspect the likes of WinSource will end up being bag holders sooner or later - you can't buy millions of $ of stock and sit on it forever.  When inventories at companies fill up, Digi-Key and  the likes will start bringing parts back into stock and at market prices, not 10x.  No one will want to buy from WS, etc., at 10x the price and they'll lose money even selling at cost because storage ain't free.

Here's to hoping all the hoarders get burned bad enough to deter hoarding next time.

[IDEngineer]

Has anyone ordered parts from Digikey's Marketplace vendors? I haven't, but there seems to be many of them and the prices are generally low. However I suspect the delivery might be slower than normal and the buyer incurs extra shipping costs because they are shipped from the vendor, not Digikey. Rochester Electronics seems to be prominent... any good?

I just ordered some switches from one of their third party vendors. That box arrived on the same day as DigiKey's own, two days later. No issues.

WRT Rochester Electronics, they're in a unique position. They often purchase the factory masks and NOS from the original manufacturer(s). In many cases they are considered a factory original vendor. Our Contract Manufacturers simply refuse to purchase parts from anyone other than the OEM's and their factory authorized distributors, and even THEY purchase from Rochester.

There are some good, and lots of awful, "brokers" out there. Those you have to watch carefully. But I have and will sign off on parts from Rochester without hesitation.

[tszaboo]

I suspect the likes of WinSource will end up being bag holders sooner or later - you can't buy millions of $ of stock and sit on it forever.  When inventories at companies fill up, Digi-Key and  the likes will start bringing parts back into stock and at market prices, not 10x.  No one will want to buy from WS, etc., at 10x the price and they'll lose money even selling at cost because storage ain't free.

Here's to hoping all the hoarders get burned bad enough to deter hoarding next time.

I think they are state funded, and they don't care if it is a loss for them, as long as it is a bigger loss for us.
The orange faced president started a trade war, and was very very loud about what they are doing. Sometimes in a war it is better not to tell what you are doing.

[RoboJim]

Chipageddon's been brutal to us.
Learned a new term; "Decomitted".
As in we have decomitted your order for 60k motor controllers
that was supposed to be delivered next month.

[T3sl4co1l]

I suspect the likes of WinSource will end up being bag holders sooner or later - you can't buy millions of $ of stock and sit on it forever.  When inventories at companies fill up, Digi-Key and  the likes will start bringing parts back into stock and at market prices, not 10x.  No one will want to buy from WS, etc., at 10x the price and they'll lose money even selling at cost because storage ain't free.

The way you play that game is, buy up initial stock -- that's your inventory investment, at market price more or less.  When market dries up, people come to you at the inflated price.  Eventually the market recovers and your inventory goes back to the same value you started with.

Thus, you need to make enough profit in the bubble, to pay back the inventory cost.  Plus acquiring ongoing stock during the bubble, which won't come as cheaply, or with the same quality.

So, you plan on your excess inventory being relatively worthless, certainly no more than the baseline price was.  You can sell off the excess after the crash and make back a little, presumably.  But you'll need to cover the rest with enough of a bubble to be worth it.  So, not like day to day inflation, or stock fluctuations, but 2x, 10x, or more price bubbles, like what we have here, it's worthwhile.

The later you start, the more expensive and volatile your inventory will be, and the harder it will be to make it back, let alone make excess profit.  Obviously, it helps if you can predict the future more accurately, like by starting one yourself.  Bonus points for also starting/being the marketplace, appraisers, etc. -- in which case you make money even if the bubble doesn't kick off (albeit maybe not as much as was spent starting it up, and obviously this only works with markets that are small and scattered enough to monopolize).  And, y'know, assuming you avoid the feds for these obviously illegal practices...

But that's something a bit more involved than your basic buy-low sell-high, and so I digress.

Tim

[harerod]

...
This is what's known as "Transitory Inflation"...     and if you believe that, the Brooklyn Bridge is only a click away from your cart! 

I keep reading "transistory inflation". L2 problem, I guess.

[VK3DRB]

Chipageddon's been brutal to us.
Learned a new term; "Decomitted".
As in we have decomitted your order for 60k motor controllers
that was supposed to be delivered next month.

That sucks. I was on an Analog Devices webinar and a participant mention a committed 5 week lead time on one million graphics chips was de-committed to 52 weeks. 

[VK3DRB]

I noticed Digikey has increased their prices of pretty much everything. The humble 0402 garden variety resistor that was 10 cents for one is now 15 cents, and volume prices have increased a lot. That has to be price gouging. Ceramic caps are a ripoff. I also notice Mouser has lower prices for similar devices. Examples are schottky power diodes and inductors.... half the price. Dodgykey is in danger of losing its fan base, and it is possible people will switch allegiances when all this rot is over.

PS: A bit of good news. I managed to source an old school buck converter from TI. Not too bad... 89% efficient. Needs sixteen external parts, but at least I can get them. The state-of-the-art synchronous converters are pretty much nil stock globally. Scrounging around finding parts is very time consuming and bloody annoying.

[Howardlong]

Has anyone ordered parts from Digikey's Marketplace vendors? I haven't, but there seems to be many of them and the prices are generally low. However I suspect the delivery might be slower than normal and the buyer incurs extra shipping costs because they are shipped from the vendor, not Digikey. Rochester Electronics seems to be prominent... any good?

Rochester deliver but take a long time to ship, over a week to ship (10 days to delivery) in my last experience a few weeks ago.

[Howardlong]

To top it all off, the entire assembly team at my CEM went into a 10 day quarantine last week :-(

[voltsandjolts]

I'm beginning to lose hope we can buy any fpgas in 2022 

[busfault]

Having to repeatedly state (for several months now)
me: "56+ week lead times is what it is it isn't just going to reduce we need to get into queue NOW",
mgr: "We can wait until the design is finalized."
 a week later
mgr: "What do you mean that 56 week lead time is now 60 weeks?" 

Quick turn houses playing the trickling "can't get this part" game. Which turns a 3 week turn into a 6 week one.

~2+ years to get Max 10 parts 

"We should drop in XYZ microntroller because ABC microcontroller is not available for 50 weeks." (Development is 90% done on ABC and is from a different manufacturer than  XYZ, but that makes sense!)

 

[IDEngineer]

I noticed Digikey has increased their prices of pretty much everything. The humble 0402 garden variety resistor that was 10 cents for one is now 15 cents, and volume prices have increased a lot. That has to be price gouging.

It might be. But I will say that even we have had to adjust our prices recently, increased by as much as 20%. What's happened is that our internal costs have been steadily increasing over the past several years and we just kept "absorbing" them to avoid complaints from our customers. This supply chain nonsense, and the increased prices that came with it, finally forced a full internal cost review which frankly shocked everyone. Nobody really understood just how bad the "boiling frog" problem had gotten. In some cases our prices weren't even covering our costs, which meant we were losing money on each item shipped.

So we adjusted our prices accordingly, in some cases as I said by +20% or so. It was painful, and we hated doing that to our customers, but we had to make up for past cost increases PLUS what these most recent supply chain increases and inbound shipping costs were doing to us.

The scary part was that our customers basically said "We don't like it, but we're not surprised. You're like the last vendor to adjust your prices, and your increases aren't the worst we've seen." The inflation is real, and it's happening across the entire economy. I'm no economist (though my wife is Magna cum Laude in Finance!) but my personal suspicion is that the reality of inflation is finally catching up with central bank low interest rates that have been artificially (and politically) maintained far too long after the 2008-2009 "Great Recession" and the flood of fiat currency that has been loosed into the world due to COVID-19. You just cannot fool the economics forever. But hey, I'm just a humble Engineer, I'm sure those politicians know what they're doing. Actually, I'm afraid they know exactly what they're doing.

[Howardlong]

Same here, looking at imposing a 20% price increase myself: it's no longer possible to shoulder the costs without becoming unviable as a business.

This is not only the increased parts costs, but also the effects on cash flow, as I have to stock up on parts ahead of time and factor in loss of income due to unplanned delays beyond my control.

Western govs are dragging their heals on this situation: there is no light at the end of the tunnel in the short, medium or long terms. IMHO we need incentives for corps to make substantial long term local investment on plant now that China has unilaterally taken control of the global supply chain.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Same here, looking at imposing a 20% price increase myself: it's no longer possible to shoulder the costs without becoming unviable as a business.

This is not only the increased parts costs, but also the effects on cash flow, as I have to stock up on parts ahead of time and factor in loss of income due to unplanned delays beyond my control.

Not to mention the extra time spent hunting around for parts, and redesigning around what's available

[IDEngineer]

Not to mention the extra time spent hunting around for parts, and redesigning around what's available

Yep, I'm estimating our Engineering staff is losing ~30% of their working hours to helping Production identify and qualify potential substitutes for out of stock components. That's time we AREN'T spending on R&D. But it has to be done because Purchasing and Production don't have the technical background to qualify if "this" SOT-23-3 PFET can be substituted for "that" SOT-23-3 PFET on the product in "next week's" production run.

Like others have mentioned, we also have started stocking single sourced parts. I hate Hate HATE designing in single sourced parts but for things like connectors and MCU's it's almost impossible to find multisourced stuff anymore. And the things that are available from multiple sources often don't meet customer requirements (especially connectors, when they've already committed to some single-source family).

[VK3DRB]

Same here, looking at imposing a 20% price increase myself: it's no longer possible to shoulder the costs without becoming unviable as a business.

This is not only the increased parts costs, but also the effects on cash flow, as I have to stock up on parts ahead of time and factor in loss of income due to unplanned delays beyond my control.

Not to mention the extra time spent hunting around for parts, and redesigning around what's available

And there is usually no room for error in selecting alternatives... form, fit and function, so to do the job properly it is tedious and even boring.

I am doing a board now which has plenty of space on it (a rare luxury), and I will be considering some alternative parts placed on the same board that are Do Not Fits, so that the variant will allow one type of the other. Therefore if one part is not available, maybe the alternative is. Unfortunately, this generally does nor work with microcontrollers or many ASICs - if those parts dry up with a lead time of 52 weeks (or the contemptuous "99 weeks"), then it can be game over. 

[IDEngineer]

I started playing around with the idea of nesting a QFN28 footprint inside of the same part's QFN44 footprint. It actually works - the result is sort of like a starburst pattern - and the result would be the ability to use either package depending upon what was available. It just required the creation of a custom footprint which was not difficult. That particular board is on hold at the moment but the concept is still valid and I'm hoping to finish it soon.