EONEWS: What is your opinion regarding this year electronic market trends (electronics means not only semiconductor but also passives and electromechanical) globally and in particular in the European region?
JEUTTER: We have experienced a fairly robust market with a slightly positive trend. Central and northern Europe is stable to growing and despite the economical challenges in the south we see also there are positive signs, companies in Italy benefit from exports. However, the south, especially in terms of domestic demand is remaining a challenge. The overall situation and discussion around the Euro-crisis is calm, but everyone is cautious how this develops. A small interest rate upward trend could trigger disproportional reactions.
EONEWS: Do you think that Europe could play in the short-medium period a key role in the global electronic market? If yes: in which sector?
JEUTTER: Europe has always played an important role in the electronics market with strength particularly in the industrial and automotive market. Despite years of production transfer into the Far East ,the majority of the industrial production with high mix and comparably lower volumes remains in Europe. Some of the off-shore production even found its way back into Europe. For high volume consumer products however there is little room in western Europe. Turkey and eastern European countries host some of it, but clearly the sectors in Europe are Automotive and Industrial, but also Medical, Appliances and very high end consumer applications.
EONEWS: What are the strategies you implement to support your future expansion in Europe?
JEUTTER: The majority of Atmel’s products require technically-capable sales people to best support our customers in the design-in process. Therefore, we work closely with our distribution partners to enable them through in depth trainings, together with them we conduct many customer trainings. This will allow them to shorten design cycles. We provide our customers not only silicon, but an excellent eco-system with software and application specific design features.
EONEWS: From a general point of view, in your opinion, are there still key barriers today to overcome, to improve the ecosystem (logistics, supply chain of vendors, distributors, dealers, etc.) of electronic distribution in Europe? If yes, what are them, and what are the solutions?
JEUTTER: The logistics and supply chain works well. There are still some gaps in the EDI connections between suppliers, distributors and customers, but this has taken major steps over the past years. Today we focus on demand creation activities to ensure in the environment of broad line distribution competent technical design in support.
EONEWS: Do you envision a particular shift in the evolution of this business model for the next future?
JEUTTER: Possibly the today’s hybrid model of logistics plus design in the European distribution separates more towards pure logistics at much lower resale margins and specialized design-in companies who specialize on the applications they support. This will heavily depend on the strategies of the distributors on terms of margin policies and investment into technical resources, particularly into vertical markets.
Read the article on EONews 567-September