We can see a lot of different market trends from the sales structure of our company.
I'm going to list a few here, not specific to any customers, I wouldn't want to break our NDAs.
PC demand experienced a gradual decrease about 3 years ago when smartphones became popular. Smartphones with touch screen, smartphones with voice controls, smartphones as another platform for software apps. Diminishing our use of PCs.
Then came tablets and phablets. Sales for computer-related products plummeted.
On the other hand, a lot of peripheral products surfaced. Drawing pad with touch functions - pinch or drag stuff; recording pen - replaces the need for keyboards, another product down the drain.
For passive component providers in the commodity section, this is probably a reeeeaaally bad transition. I specifically say commodity component because it distinguishes us from them :P
Our sales from passives come mostly from niche market products. Such as those in the automotives and industrial industry. That includes industrial machineries, aviation, vehicles applications, etcs.
And why is this a bad transition? People buy new smartphones once every two years. More products, more demand for suppliers. While for PCs, consumers don't switch until they've had four or five years out of their machine. However, (there's always a however) the number of components in a smartphone is a lot lower than that in a PC. We are looking at 100+ passives in a smartphone compared to 1000+ in a PC. Sales lost in one computer is difficult to compensate for unless demand for smartphone to PC is above 10:1. Or else, we are looking at stable (optimistic?) or gradual decline of passive components sales.
Another interesting coming-of-age change is ebooks. Amazon and Apple filed new patents that allow them to resale "used" ebooks.
Ebooks are great, they weigh nothing, they are digitalized, you can put thousands of them in one place, they can be called up on all sorts of media. It's just this one thing - you can't give, donate, or share it, at least without giving up your e-reader. Once the news came out, it went viral. There were number of interesting discussions on whether a used book can be resold more than once. If this is the case, then would it be cheaper everytime it was sold? But the contents are actually new, and remain new regardless of how many people have possession of it. And there's the question of ownership. Who owns what and when? Does Amazon earn anything during the process? Will there be less "new" issues of books since everyone would be looking to resell after they've read a book?
Expecting a head to toe change of the second-handed industry.
