[TriEmbed] Avnet and Premier Farnell aka Newark Electronics, MCM and Eagle

[Pete Soper]

Two months ago Avnet ($27B FY sales) finished buying Premier Farnell 
($1B), a Leeds, England-based corporation that had US-based pieces of 
its organization Newark Element14, and the Ohio-based retail-facing 
entity MCM Electronics. I say "had" because Avnet ultimately has them 
now, not to imply they're going anywhere unless/until Avnet makes 
changes. MCM is a "non-core brand", as is "AVID Technologies" (that is 
somehow allowed to use this name despite the major collision with the 
big media company called Avid Technologies. Try launching APPLE as 
distinct from Apple and see what happens, hah!).

In 2009 Premier Farnell bought Cadsoft, the creator of the Eagle PCB CAD 
software. They seem to have nicely managed this, as Eagle hasn't been 
turned upside down with aggressive feature/UI changes (except for the 
autorouter), nor have they messed with the pricing/licensing as far as I 
could tell the last time I looked at that (last year). And this explains 
why the Element14 web site has a ton of Eagle component libraries.

On a personal note, I had gotten "trained out of" buying from Newark 
despite their fantastic mega warehouse in Gafney, SC, because frequently 
what I wanted didn't sit in that warehouse, it sat in Leeds and Newark 
wanted $20 to get it to the US. They seem to have dropped this surcharge 
now, so the only downside is an extra few days to get the stock moved. I 
recently bought some super fantastic CK wire strippers this way at a 
better price than what I could find from US sources. The UK's recent 
self-inflicted head wound changed the price equation, of course, and the 
currency rate-related differences in some Newark prices might persist 
with Avnet.

-Pete

On 12/05/2016 01:55 PM, Scott Hall via TriEmbed wrote:

> MCM now /is/ Element14 / Newark.

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