Arrow Electronic

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Recommendation

Reject the proposal of Express. Prepare for the competition of Express by launching aggressive marketing campaign to match the price of Express in short run. Maintain and improve gross margin on BAS sales by leverage the strong relationship with supplier to get the lowest price. Continue improving the value added content, short delivery lead time and inventory management as main values of the company. Aggressively invest R&D to provide an on-line booking and ordering system to further improve customer’s time-to-market, facilitate the BAS sale order; provide the customer “efficient, low price, one-stop-shop” experience that will differentiate A/S from competitors. Focus on VA sales and improve the service, consistently grow sale volume of VA content.

Support

Values of Arrow/Schweber (A/S): Being as the subsidiary of the No.1 distributor of electronic parts company Arrow Electronic, A/S is able to provide customers low price electronic parts and add-value system design solution. A/S also creates demand and provides the inventory buffer for suppliers. The Customer benefits from A/S of low cost parts, technical support and short delivery lead time. And suppliers benefit from A/S of hassle-free sales. Internet trading service Express creates one more level to the existing value chain (Exhibit 1). Express allows A/S to have opportunity to sell product to potential customers. And customers can place order on different distributors. But whether this business model is valuable to the customer especially to small OEM and CM is questionable. Although transactional customers are price sensitive, time to market is also critical to them. They prefer to place entire order within one company to make sure the short delivery lead time. Under this circumstance, jumping into the Express boat is not a wise decision for A/S.

VA Business--Key Business for A/S: Among the overall business of A/S, the VA sales increases from 2% in 1977 to 62% in 1996, and it targets to grow to 80% in 2000. Although the VA gross margin is only 10-15%, it is the key business for A/S to create the demand. For example, one of suppliers, Altera, sells 80% of PLD to its two distributors because value-added programming required by individual customers. Suppliers rely on distributor to generate demand. In return, they offer A/S: Price protection & limited return privileges, warranties not available to others, and control prices by providing discounts. Because of the importance of VA business, it evolved from simple inventory buffer to alter components to meet customer needs by programming or kitting parts, to virtual organization, and to order cycle management.

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