1. What is the most significant market shift you're seeing in electronic component distribution in 2026?

The most significant shift is structural, not cyclical — and it's been building for years. The industry has largely moved through the inventory correction we anticipated, but what's emerging on the other side isn't a clean return to balance. What we're seeing is a bifurcated market: advanced nodes are supply-constrained by design, as fabs chase AI and hyperscaling demand and deprioritize everything else, while legacy and longtail components — particularly in the ≥65nm range — face a permanent supply problem, not a temporary one.

The 25-to-60-nanometer range is the zone of greatest concern. Fabs aren't building new capacity for those nodes. They're not profitable enough relative to sub-11nm, so they get starved of investment. That means the industrial, aerospace, defense, and infrastructure companies that depend on those components for products with 15- and 20-year field lives are going to find themselves without a direct-from-factory option. That's not a 2026 problem — that's a decade-long structural reality, and distributors with vertically integrated sourcing and authentication capabilities are the only viable solution for that segment of the market.

2. How are geopolitical tensions, trade policy changes, and tariffs influencing your sourcing and regional strategies?

Geopolitics has moved from being a background risk factor to a front-line operational reality. We've always built geographic diversification into our sourcing model — that's table stakes in independent distribution — but the pace and unpredictability of policy change since 2025 has forced every serious distributor to build more redundancy and more regional flexibility than they otherwise would have chosen to carry.

The tariff environment has had two distinct effects. First, it's compressed decision windows. Customers who used to plan on 6- to 12-month procurement horizons are being asked to make decisions in weeks as pricing signals shift. Second, it's accelerated the regionalization of supply — customers want to understand not just where a part was manufactured, but where it was sourced from, where it transited, and what its exposure is to any given trade action. That's a more complex intelligence problem than pure price and availability, and it's one where our global footprint and multi-region sourcing relationships give us a material advantage.

3. What capital or investment priorities are shaping your company's growth strategy?

Our highest-conviction investment has been in vertically integrated services — specifically, building out a full quality assurance, testing, and component re-balling capability in-house. The reasoning is straightforward: if those components aren't going to be available direct from factories, and if the industrial and defense customers who need them require full authentication and re-balling support to put them into their applications, then a distributor that can offer a complete solution — source, authenticate, test, re-ball, and deliver — is in a fundamentally different competitive position than one that is just moving parts.

4. How are customer expectations changing, and how is your company differentiating through service or digital capabilities?

Customer expectations have evolved significantly since the pandemic-era constraint period. The experience of being caught without supply — of having production lines go down or program milestones slip because a component was unavailable — fundamentally changed how procurement and engineering leadership think about distribution partners. The conversation is no longer just about price and availability. It's about predictability, transparency, and depth of capability.

The customers we're most valuable to are no longer looking for a transaction. They want a partner that can give them honest market intelligence, that can help them build a proactive obsolescence management program before EOL notices catch them flat-footed, and that can be genuinely useful in a shortage rather than just confirming they can't help. That requires a different kind of relationship and a different kind of organization — one with real market data, real testing capability, and real accountability on quality.

5. What are the biggest operational challenges you're working to overcome right now?

Three things dominate. First, visibility — into emerging supply disruptions before they become crises, and into customers' hidden longtail dependencies before an EOL notice surfaces them. Second, talent — the combination of deep component engineering knowledge and data fluency this market demands is genuinely scarce. Third, policy velocity — the bandwidth consumed by continuously tracking tariff and export control changes, translating them for customers, and recalibrating sourcing positions accordingly is a real and underappreciated operational cost.