Smith & Associates Finds Mobility is Hottest Trend In the Supply Chain

Smith & Associates, the largest independent distributor of electronic components, recently announced new information from its Supply Chain Survey and Report.

The latest results confirm the prominence of mobile, cloud and social media technologies as those that will continue to most influence the supply chain in the coming years.

These influences will range from increasing challenge to commoditize System on Chip (SoC) designs to extending ubiquitous computing. These supply chain and technology impacts are discussed in detail in the latest Smith MarketWatch Quarterly.

Smith’s survey of nearly 200 respondents spanning the electronics industry asked respondents about their views of the expected influence of Social Media, RFID, Mobile Technologies, Cloud, and Big Data on the semiconductor and electronics industry.

A majority of respondents in the Smith Survey (68%) identified Mobile Technologies as the most influential technology in the supply chain in the coming years. Results were analyzed according to the category of the respondents: Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Contract Manufacturers (CMs), Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS), and Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) . The responses were highly consistent and revealed the following:

• All sectors identified Mobile Technologies as the most influential technology affecting the industry,
• Social Media and Cloud Computing rank closely behind.

The survey results parallel trends Smith has identified in the broader semiconductor and electronics market. The continued high demand for mobile devices is having a demonstrable influence on the semiconductor supply chain, well beyond just the financial.

The high demand for mobile devices is not only changing the direction of all types of design innovation through research and development (R&D) investments; it is also pushing the direction of commoditization of chips and subassemblies.

What “mobility” means to a user is influencing the very architecture of chips as well as the semiconductor industry as a whole. The continued advances in Smart Wireless Devices (SWDs) have pushed the expectation for seamless and constant connectivity into a growing range of devices.

In turn, the combination of user demands and technological advances is pushing data transmission levels to extremes and challenging carriers and cloud service providers to meet continued strong demand, supporting significant investments in developing new mobile technologies.

Related to the strength of mobile technologies, the recent Smith survey also identified cloud and social media as directly influencing the supply chain. While enterprise social media continues to expand in adoption, both cloud (which includes M2M communication) and social media are at the center of today’s collaboration and customer relationship management, as well as important mechanisms for collecting product ratings and reviews.

Smith’s recent survey results underscore the cross-industry view regarding the importance of mobile technologies influencing the direction of R&D, products, and the latest chip architectures.

Additional survey results were released earlier this month and are summarized in the Smith Supply Chain Report.