Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1174596
Dave Doherty. How have you seen that situa- tion change? Beeson: It's changed drastically. 2018 was a phenomenal year from a Digi-Key perspective. We were well-positioned coming out of 2017 with products, but things significantly shift- ed. Lead times that were 12 weeks went to 50 weeks. Products that weren't readily available became available. There was a whole domi- no effect with double ordering, etc. We have seen that lead times—which were excessive, and in some cases, to the point of on alloca- tion—have normalized for us in almost every category. The year 2018 was an anomaly re- lated to what was happening around the globe with consumption. Currently, we have a small pocket of devices that are not aligned with our in-stock rate expectations. Part of our contrar - ian approach is to look at our inventory, but not in a traditional inventory-turns orienta- tion; we've always looked at it as an in-stock orientation. Traditional businesses would look at that and probably not applaud our inventory turns be- cause our business was very healthy last year. We went from $2.3 billion to $3.2 billion as a business, so we grew by $900 million. So, the inventory served us well. What was interesting last year was that as hard as inventory was to get, we grew ours more than we grew our sales in a percentage of our inventory. Going into 2019, we knew that we were over- inventoried, but that's okay for us because our business goes through the cycles of the indus- try; whether it's trending up or down, we want to be well-positioned, especially to support the engineering community. We are seeing drastic changes with our suppliers and the supplier community related to positioning. Right now, we're trying to monitor stated lead times with data. It was 50 weeks, but now it's down to 12 weeks. What is it if we place an order? In many cases, we're seeing that even the stated lead time at 12 weeks is lower; it may be eight or even four weeks until delivery. We are trying to monitor our suppliers and where they are from a supply chain perspec- tive. But once again, a handful of product cat- egories, such as pockets of MLCCs, aren't as readily available as what the industry would like to see. Whether it's memory or MOSFETs