Director of Operations,
4 Star Electronics
Electronics Sourcing North America asked 4 Star Electronics whether 2025 is a year for caution or a year to take the initiative in aggressively pursuing new opportunities?
After a tumultuous few years, 2025 is a time for distributors to pause to assess the market and look for new opportunities. There’s no point standing still and wishing for widespread shortages to come back; there is still excess stock in the supply chain and uncertain demand due to global economic conditions, geopolitical tensions and trade disruptions such as tariffs and export restrictions.
Industry has little control over these issues, but distributors can strengthen themselves for the future. The following are pointers.
Take advantage of the current market. There are still shortages of MLCCs, power semiconductors and CPUs/GPUs. Even without economic recovery, these categories are showing high demand.
Be prepared. If there is a significant recovery and associated increase in demand, distributors must be ready to respond quickly since manufacturing capacity has not increased substantially and a return of widespread shortages is possible.
Consider new supply chain strategies to build stronger supplier networks.
Counterfeit components continue to be a risk, so take steps to build inspection and testing capacity.
Be strategic with technology investments to help gain real-time insights into market trends and forecasting to ensure future efficiency.
Optimize inventory management. There will continue to be tremendous opportunities to buy and stock excess inventory now, helping smooth future supply fluctuations.
