On a cold winter evening when the weather is dismal and its dark before 5pm I can think of nothing better than curling up on the sofa with a hot chocolate and watching something on the TV. I am sure I am not alone in that guilty pleasure.

Nevertheless, despite our fondness for the beloved TV there has been a drop in global television demand of 3% in 2013. Moving forward this is set to change and the semiconductor market for TVs is forecasted to increase by an estimated 7%. This estimated increase is vastly due to the increase of technologies in TV sets such as LED backlighting, wireless video connections, multi-format decoders and networking interfaces thus increasing the content of semiconductors per device. read more...

On a cold winter evening when the weather is dismal and its dark before 5pm I can think of nothing better than curling up on the sofa with a hot chocolate and watching something on the TV. I am sure I am not alone in that guilty pleasure.

Nevertheless, despite our fondness for the beloved TV there has been a drop in global television demand of 3% in 2013. Moving forward this is set to change and the semiconductor market for TVs is forecasted to increase by an estimated 7%. This estimated increase is vastly due to the increase of technologies in TV sets such as LED backlighting, wireless video connections, multi-format decoders and networking interfaces thus increasing the content of semiconductors per device. read more...

Times are challenging, profit margin is key, we need to save money and all departments are under pressure to offer savings for fear of an uncertain future.

So what better way to do this in procurement than sourcing our own obsolete and hard-to-find products?! It can't be that difficult you think to yourself... you search for a part - Google seems like a sensible place - then bingo!, you have hundreds of ‘suppliers' showing the stock you need. You think....”I'll buy from one of these companies, cut out the middle man, and reduce my costs”. read more...

As a keen shopper, when out buying clothes the most frustrating thing for me is to find an item that you want but the store has stock in every size but your own! Well fortunately one store may have the answer! As one of the UK's leading retailers with over 760 stores and with over 21 million people visiting their stores each week shopping for clothing, home products and food, M&S is updating its radio frequency identification technology as it begins to tag all clothing and hard goods as a successor to the barcode to provide better customer service through improved product availability.

As a pioneer in the use of RFID, in 2001 M&S began attaching re-useable RFID tags to food trays for tracking deliveries between their suppliers and distribution centres to find out how well the technology functioned. With the technology working successfully, M&S report that almost 10 million RFID-tagged food trays are now continuously transported around their supply chain from supplier to distribution then finally to your local store, with trays of fresh flowers and plants also now being tracked. read more...

Smartphones and tablets, most of us own either one or both. Personally, I would struggle without a Blackberry and I don't know what I would do without my Kindle. (How else can you take a library of books away with you whilst only using the space of a single paperback?) Both these gadgets have almost rendered my dear laptop redundant and I am sure that I am not the only one that feels this way either. The electronics market as a whole seems to be in agreement with me.

Our fondness for such gadgets has resulted in the worldwide electronics industry coming back with a moderate growth. The period of December 2012 and January 2013 showed a 3.8% growth in direct correlation to that of the previous year whereas the previous year to year figures showed a decline. Where the PC was a major factor in the semiconductor and electronic industry for the past 3 decades the growth has been stagnant over the last 2 years. PCs are slowly being displaced in the market by tablets as well as creating their own market at the same time. Since Apple's iPad encouraged the current wave of tablets in 2Q 2010 shipments grew to over 50 million units in 4Q 2012. read more...