Structural change is taking place in the component distribution market, and the rate of change is accelerating, says Ian Mason, CEO of Electrocomponents, owners of RS.
"A structural change is taking place in the market," Mason told Electronics Weekly at Electronica in Munich this week.
The big changes, says Mason, are the rapid speed the online business is developing and the potential opportunity for online distributors like RS to expand their business into small order fulfilment for manufacturers.
This is something rival online distributor Digi-Key has been doing in the US, and Mason says RS is doing something similar.
"We are pushing up into that grey area of the market that sits between traditional catalogue business serving design and the volume distributors," says Mason.
"We have a definite plan to win some of that business, perhaps at a lower level than Digi-Key is doing, but there is a vast market in the middle we can go after," said Mason.
He defines the business now as small batch supply to manufacturers, say up to around 2,000 pieces per order. "We can follow projects from design into prototyping and even into initial production," said Mason.
This is something with Digi-Key has been doing in the US for a couple of years and now a significant portion of its business there comes from manufacturing customers.
The other change Mason sees is an an acceleration away from the catalogue and onto the internet for businesses like RS.
Mason said that RS had already started to reduce the scale of its print catalogue and was cutting back on how many it printed each year.
"That evolution has speeded up and there will definitely be more changes to come," says Mason.
"The catalogue is still a vital tool for us, but we are starting to see it as a reference document. Only a third of our product offering is in the catalogue today, all our products are on the website," said Mason.
Mason has also been surprised by the early take-up of the distributor's design tool portal known as DesignSpark.
"It has progressed beyond our expectations," said Mason.
After three months the website has 18,000 registered embers and has had 150,000 visitors, according to Mason.
"This is exciting and I see a long way to run with this," said Mason.