How Recent MLCC End-of-Life Announcements Helped to Disrupt the High-Tech Economy in 2018 and What to Expect in 2019

TTI MarketEye Overview

In this MarketeEYE article, Dennis Zogbi of Paumanok Industrial Market Research creates a timeline of discontinuation announcements for multilayered ceramic chip capacitors (MLCC) and demonstrates their impact on lead times, and offers the reader a glimpse about what is coming at them next with respect to MLCC in 2019.

 

Background

Multilayered ceramic chip capacitors (MLCC) have been in short supply since mid-2017, and this problem compounded itself in 2018 as many customers went below their comfort threshold in MLCC inventories or had to curtail product production because they could not get enough of the “right” MLCC.  Primary sources interviewed for this MarketEYE article have consistently pointed toward the combined discontinuation of MLCC by Murata and TDK from 2016 through 2018 as the primary reason why this shortage has occurred.  TDK and Murata are not the only vendors who have curtailed or stopped production of MLCC, and Paumanok notes that such vendors as Samsung, Taiyo Yuden and Walsin have also pulled back from large case size MLCC production or consolidated that production for the automotive industry in 2019.  The following creates a timeline of discontinuation, last order date and final production date and compared it to MLCC lead times.

(1) EOL- End-Of-Life-Announcement of Discontinuation-
a. Manufacturers of MLCC who wish to stop production of a specific series will make an announcement in which the (1) end-of-life (EOL) date of the component is established, followed by a last order date and a final shipment date.

(2) Last Order Date-
a.  The last order date for an MLCC means the last date the manufacturer will accept orders for this specific series.

(3) Last Shipment Date-
a. This date is the last date upon which the factory will ship MLCC in the discontinued series

These three criteria help us to establish a time line and then match that time-line to subsequent analytical data showing the changes in lead times for MLCC by date as well, and how the end-of-life dates are significant in how they created shortages in the supply chain that continue in 2019.

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