Once again, we are seeing electronics pricing going up and lead times going out. The two greatest factors are data center demand and raw material input supply issues due to the war in Iran.
The plastic housings, elastomers, and printed circuit boards that are foundational to all of our electronic devices all require resins and petrochemicals. Critical processing plants for these materials in Saudi Arabia have been offline since late spring due to Iranian strikes, raising component costs by as much as 50%.
If you’ve gone to buy memory for a computer recently, you know that prices are through the roof. Data centers are gobbling up whatever they can get a hold of and now competing with the capacity that is also used for manufacturing embedded devices. We have components that were 20 week lead time go to 50+ week lead time.
If you are Apple or Nvidia, you can throw around your billions of dollars and at least get first in line. Not so much for us little guys
When we started JARDUM 10 years ago, supply chain wasn’t much of a concern. Now it’s a near daily issues. I have to say, I don’t like it. I don’t like pushing on our vendors, many of which themselves are small businesses, to squeeze wherever they can to bring in material and reduce price increases. And even worse, is calling customers and telling them their prices are going up and their lead times are going out.
Maybe the 2030s will be a calm decade for electronics. The 20s definitely are not.
