Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Green strategy focuses on range expansion
Premier Farnell has announced the results of its strategic business review initiated following the appointment of Harriet Green as Group CEO.
Premier Farnell has announced the results of its strategic business review initiated following the appointment of Harriet Green as Group CEO in April 2006. This will see the distributor cement its position as a market leader in the fast growing electronic design engineering market, estimated at GBP 13 billion worldwide. Building on the success of its leadership position on RoHS, the organisation plans to further strengthen its proposition to engineers, by adding approximately 70,000 products to its current stocked range of approximately 300,000 over a three-year period.
By the end of the three-year period Premier Farnell expects to be offering customers access to close to a million products.
This, coupled with improvements to the organisation's web platform - including an enhanced search engine and web front-end - will provide design engineers with a fast and efficient channel to access a comprehensive range of products and associated technical information.
Although there has been recent growth in web traffic, meeting customer demand to interact seamlessly either via the web, through call centres or in person will remain a key component of Premier Farnell's multichannel service offering.
As part of its strategic review, Premier Farnell will also continue to strengthen its global supplier portfolio, building on the successes of the last 18 months, which have included extending its offering to customers with 3000 new products, following global franchise deals with AVX, Cypress Semiconductor, Lumileds, STMicroelectonics and ZMD.
The distributor's product range now includes the majority of the world's leading semiconductor, passive and electromechanical brands, offering a compelling proposition to design engineers globally.
Premier Farnell is also pleased to announce that its product offering to customers will be further enhanced in the near future following the commitment of Analog Devices - a world leading manufacturer of analogue and digital signal processing products - to re-engauge with Newark InOne in the USA, continuing to strengthen the excellent trading relationship in Europe with Farnell InOne and starting to formulate longer term plans for working together to support customers in other regions around the world.
The electronics and automation maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) customer base will continue to be significant for Premier Farnell.
In addition, there are plans to invest in emerging markets, with immediate focus on China and Eastern Europe.
The Chinese market for small volume electronics is estimated at over GBP 1 billion annually and growing rapidly, offering a significant growth opportunity and potential to achieve market leadership.
By March 2007 Premier Farnell will have launched its Mandarin language catalogue containing over 30,000 products, 20,000 of which will be stocked in China, with the rest available on short lead times.
This coincides with the deadline for the introduction of the Chinese equivalent of the EU RoHS legislation and all of the products included in the Mandarin catalogue will be compliant with the first wave of legislative requirements.
Chinese customers already have access, via the web, to the full range of Farnell InOne products.
This access will be enhanced when a transactional website, with Mandarin content, goes live, also in early 2007.
Harriet Green, Chief Executive, commenting on the strategic business review, said: 'We believe that enhancing our market proposition in the fast growing global electronic design engineering sector is fundamental to our strategy to become a market leader in this segment'.
'We will continue to focus on the core distribution fundamentals of customer service, product range and reliability as we drive sales growth and operational efficiency'.
'The strategic business review process has demonstrated the quality of our people at all levels of the organisation and we will continue to invest in talent and skills development'.
Premier Farnell has announced the results of its strategic business review initiated following the appointment of Harriet Green as Group CEO in April 2006. This will see the distributor cement its position as a market leader in the fast growing electronic design engineering market, estimated at GBP 13 billion worldwide. Building on the success of its leadership position on RoHS, the organisation plans to further strengthen its proposition to engineers, by adding approximately 70,000 products to its current stocked range of approximately 300,000 over a three-year period.
By the end of the three-year period Premier Farnell expects to be offering customers access to close to a million products.
This, coupled with improvements to the organisation's web platform - including an enhanced search engine and web front-end - will provide design engineers with a fast and efficient channel to access a comprehensive range of products and associated technical information.
Although there has been recent growth in web traffic, meeting customer demand to interact seamlessly either via the web, through call centres or in person will remain a key component of Premier Farnell's multichannel service offering.
As part of its strategic review, Premier Farnell will also continue to strengthen its global supplier portfolio, building on the successes of the last 18 months, which have included extending its offering to customers with 3000 new products, following global franchise deals with AVX, Cypress Semiconductor, Lumileds, STMicroelectonics and ZMD.
The distributor's product range now includes the majority of the world's leading semiconductor, passive and electromechanical brands, offering a compelling proposition to design engineers globally.
Premier Farnell is also pleased to announce that its product offering to customers will be further enhanced in the near future following the commitment of Analog Devices - a world leading manufacturer of analogue and digital signal processing products - to re-engauge with Newark InOne in the USA, continuing to strengthen the excellent trading relationship in Europe with Farnell InOne and starting to formulate longer term plans for working together to support customers in other regions around the world.
The electronics and automation maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) customer base will continue to be significant for Premier Farnell.
In addition, there are plans to invest in emerging markets, with immediate focus on China and Eastern Europe.
The Chinese market for small volume electronics is estimated at over GBP 1 billion annually and growing rapidly, offering a significant growth opportunity and potential to achieve market leadership.
By March 2007 Premier Farnell will have launched its Mandarin language catalogue containing over 30,000 products, 20,000 of which will be stocked in China, with the rest available on short lead times.
This coincides with the deadline for the introduction of the Chinese equivalent of the EU RoHS legislation and all of the products included in the Mandarin catalogue will be compliant with the first wave of legislative requirements.
Chinese customers already have access, via the web, to the full range of Farnell InOne products.
This access will be enhanced when a transactional website, with Mandarin content, goes live, also in early 2007.
Harriet Green, Chief Executive, commenting on the strategic business review, said: 'We believe that enhancing our market proposition in the fast growing global electronic design engineering sector is fundamental to our strategy to become a market leader in this segment'.
'We will continue to focus on the core distribution fundamentals of customer service, product range and reliability as we drive sales growth and operational efficiency'.
'The strategic business review process has demonstrated the quality of our people at all levels of the organisation and we will continue to invest in talent and skills development'.
# posted by Swathi @ 8:59 PM 
