The semiconductor/electrical components shortage has not gone unnoticed by now, especially with the news coverage it had so far. It’s effecting most industries dealing with electrical components such as car manufacturers, which seem to have an especially hard time. We have been doing our best to handle the crisis, often solving it by throwing money at the problem. When you are a small player like us, you just don’t get prioritized by the big electronics manufacturers, and paying more at the open market is most often the only solution. In the beginning of May this year we had to increase our prices to counteract our increased cost as communicated in this blog post. Hopefully we will not have to increase them more but the shortage is now estimated to last for yet another year or two, and who knows how it eventually will effect us.
Another outcome of the semiconductor shortage is that the manufacturing lead-times has become very long and uncertain, so stock management has become much harder. We have solved it partially by increasing our stock but that also requires capital, which is a limited resource. We think we have managed quite OK so far but as of now Crazyflie 2.1, Multiranger-deck and SD-card decks are out of stock. Crazyflie 2.1 will hopefully arrive at the end of this week and the Multiranger and SD-card decks at the end of December. Even though times are a bit tough right now we are positive and believe we will be able to keep good stock levels throughout the crisis. We might not be able to guarantee that no products will be out of stock, but we can promise to do our very, very best to stay on top of this situation!