Distributors launch authorized website to tackle counterfeit parts
The site at www.globalauthorized.com has been set up by the IDEA federation of component distribution trade associations and uses a real time API into sites, at the moment for the US but expanding to Europe and Asia Pacific over the next quarter.
“The aim is to take out a lot of the grey market where there’s a bigger problem of counterfeit product,” said Adam Fletcher, chairman of IDEA and of the UK’s AFDEC component distributors’ association. “That’s something around 1.5 to 2% of sales.”
This is an important move as the prospect of longer lead times is set to make the challenge of counterfeit parts more important, says Fletcher. With distributors such as Digi-Key shipping globally from the US the impact of lead times becomes more pressing. This is going to be increasingly important as lead times get longer in 2014, he says. “I think 2014 is going to be quite a good year, but the move from two a week lead time to 16 weeks happens in a week, and a mid range systems integrator in the UK or Germany is really going to struggle to get hold of components,” he said.
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