> ERA Quick Connections — February 2025, Vol. 1
February 2025, Volume 1
MANUFACTURING DATA REPORTS
Manufacturing data reports from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) are released at the beginning of every month and can be accessed at ISM. The latest report says economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in January after 26 months of contraction.
The electrical equipment, appliances & components sector reported growth in January; the computer end electronic products sector reported contraction. Read the full report.
INDUSTRY NEWS
> The Trump administration announced this past weekend it would enact 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods and a 10% additional tariff on Chinese goods. Then on Monday, the White House announced it was pausing the tariff on Mexico and Canada for one month. Read more.
> The U.S. Commerce Department is looking into whether Chinese company DeepSeek has been using U.S. chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, reported Reuters. Read more.
> In late January, the Supreme Court lifted a recent injunction related to the Corporate Transparency Act. However, there is another court case still pending and the FinCEN agency recently clarified that registration is still voluntary. Read more.
INDUSTRY TRENDS SURVEY
The February ERA Electronics Components Industry Trends survey is now in your inbox! Check your inbox and fill out the survey today.
Please note: ERA sends this survey monthly to one contact from each ERA member firm via email. Please be on the lookout for this survey in your email inbox. Help us make this survey a valuable resource for you and the rest of our members by taking 5 minutes to complete this each month. The results are visible only to ERA members and gives us a great cross-section of what our members see on the horizon for the near and long term.
VIEW SURVEY RESULTS
ERA NEWS
> The 2025 ERA Conference is in 20 short days! We can’t wait to see all of our ERA colleagues and friends in Austin.
-View the Conference brochure.
-Download the official Conference app.
-Register for the Monday night party, if you haven’t already!
-Choose your breakout sessions.
> Did you know that all STEP (Sales Training for Electronics Professionals) programming and ERA LIVE programming is archived and available to all?
STEP years 2021-2024 can be found here and each year’s program can be purchased for a small fee by members and non-members. ERA LIVE archives can be found on the ERA LIVE YouTube channel — free to all!
Enjoy ERA content… right at your fingertips!
> ERA offers a few benefits to its members you may not know about, including a bulletin board for open job positions and acquisitions and mergers; an industry dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations and terminology; sales training video archives for purchase; industry survey results; and a white paper library! Take advantage today.
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MONTHLY POS REPORTS
> Place your company name and brand in front of ERA’s 4,000+ industry contacts by advertising with ERA in 2025!
The 89-year-old Electronics Representatives Association (ERA) is the international trade organization for professional field sales companies in the global electronics industries, manufacturers who go to market through representative firms and global distributors. It is the mission of ERA to support the professional field sales function through programs and activities that educate, inform and advocate for manufacturers’ representatives, the principals they represent and the distributors who are reps’ partners in local territories. Visit 
> Join Walter E. Tobin, CEO of the ERA, at the Electronics Life Cycle and Supply Chain Summit as he explores the pressing issue of the electronic components supply chain being buried in inventory. Whether you’re a seasoned expert or just starting out, this session will provide insight into unraveling the complexities of our current supply chain challenges. 
> EDS 2025 space registration is now open! Registration for returning companies who wish to rent weekly meeting space at EDS 2025 (Executive Meeting Rooms, Hotel Meeting Suites, Lily Ballroom space) is now open. If your company wants to rent space at EDS 2025 for the first time or after a gap of a few years, check out the space options on the 
Link.ai users: there are incredible new features on the ERA SearchLink.ai engine! In this 
> ERA is thrilled to announce Nikolas Badminton, futurist speaker and best-selling author, and Melissa Dailey Fairbanks, financial analyst in the semiconductor and IT supply chain sectors, as General Session speakers at the 2025 ERA Conference in February! Read the 
The Electronics Representatives Association (ERA) announces that Erik Qualman, top technology speaker, #1 best-selling author and futurist, will be the keynote speaker at the 2025 ERA Conference, taking place Feb. 23-25, 2025, in Austin, Texas.
> ERA proudly introduces 
> There is still time to register for ERA’s annual 
> Don’t forget to secure your spot at the 2025 
> What does recovery look like?
FROM THE TOP
What does recovery look like?
by John O’Brien, CPMR
ERA Chairman of the Board
How many of us are asked in meetings, “What do you see for recovery of the electronics industry?” Let’s face it, everyone is skeptical about when a recovery will occur, most people not venturing out more than two quarters to look for the growth we all know will return. Our industry is so cyclical that we often go through great periods of growth followed by short periods on flat or contraction. For those who have been around awhile, we can look back at the dotcom bust or the allocation periods, for example.
What I believe we are experiencing this time around are multiple forces driving our industry, but not always in the same direction. Going back to 2019/2020 and the COVID-19 era, expectations when COVID-19 first hit and everything shut down were that our industry would face a big downturn. I remember a meeting in March 2020 when we discussed how we would adjust to an anticipated drop in sales and revenue. As our people moved to work-from-home, it drove a surge in the very products we supply to support his new work model. As concerns arose over testing and treatments, our medical markets began to thrive.
Then 2021/2022 hit and the disruption in supply chain started to take hold. Customers bought usages going out a year so they could try to maintain their production. Then when they couldn’t get parts, they opened up their BOMs to cover build demands.
2023 rolled around and everyone was sitting on too much inventory. Everywhere throughout the supply chain, distributors, CEMs and OEMs all had raw materials inventory and in many cases, finished goods, that outpaced the end customer demand. So, throughout 2024, we’ve been tracking inventory work-downs. We’ve been watching end customer shipments but up until recently, design efforts were limited to sustaining engineering. Recently, we’ve started to see an increase in new product designs. These new designs are definitely taking longer and there are fewer going on at the same time.
So do these factors signal a recovery? I’ll get back to my original premise, “How do we define recovery?” If we look at recovery as a return to sales numbers equal or greater to the heights we’ve seen (for us that was 2022), then I believe we are still a ways out from there. Price pressures from the OEMs are causing lower overall sales, but, with similar volumes we’ve seen prior. Most recently, I’ve spoken to a number of folks at principals, distributors and CEMs and many are looking at 2019/2020 as a comparative time frame to 2024 and beyond. Everything I outlined previously in the article “artificially” inflated our numbers, so a comparison to a more stable time may help provide greater insight into what’s happening.
No matter how you define recovery, we all learned a valuable lesson over the past four years. We are a resilient industry that touches so many markets that help offset downturns. We are also an adaptive industry that sees these changes and can react quickly. Working together as reps, manufacturers and distributors, we will recover and be stronger than before.
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