Critical Links

Please welcome Richard Tapping of Semicentral.com to EDN’s Critical Links blog.

I met Richard (pictured below) about six months ago after writing “Fighting back against the grey market,” a blog post for Critical Link’s sister electronics supply chain blog Supply Chain Reaction. Upon reading it, Richard sent me a detailed e-mail about his business model (a fully functional e-commerce platform that is created and managed by its registered sellers, stay tuned for more on that later) and his views on the grey market.

Richard, who spent the majority of his career at distributor Abacus Group Plc in Europe, moved to the United States in 2004 where he experienced the grey market for a short while before creating Semicentral.com.

From where Richard stands, “grey” isn’t necessarily a dirty word. It’s the elements that pollute the market – components counterfeiting, for example – that leave a tarnish on the grey market link of the electronics supply chain.

Phone calls followed our e-mail meeting and since then Richard has proved to hold a rare and humorous sort of wit and an insurmountable knowledge of the electronics supply chain. And that’s not just my opinion. Richard has written some of EDN’s electronic supply chain community’s most read content. See his December 2007 article “Identity crisis in the gray market” and his January piece, “Counterfeit product declines as grey market struggles in 2008.”

I think you’ll enjoy what he shares in his first Critical Links post, “The universal law of supply and demand and the grey market.” Read on and share your comments in the post. And please join me in welcoming Richard to EDN’s Critical Links blog.

--Suzanne Deffree, EDN Managing Editor, News