Resistor voltage rating

Dunno about that. I'm told (by the Pres of one of our sales companies) that Mouser sits on $1B in inventory that gets one turn per year. That's a lot of money just sitting there inflating away.

Cost of money is low these days, and their markup is pretty high.

Do you know if they are getting suppliers to subsidize the cost of inventory?

--sp

"Spehro Pefhany" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Now you're all assuming that it's all about delivery and logistics. It's not. In the old days, people were content to use the Indian postal service for everything except heavy stuff. It's slow but cheap, fairly reliable and has good coverage.

Now we have a large number of national and regional couriers to choose from.We even have FedEx. The Postal Department's own courier "Speed Post" is actually the fastest one for my region. And cheap - it costs $1.40 to ship a 1 lb package from Delhi to my door, a distance of 1100 air miles.

No, it's not about delivery. In my non-expert opinion, the problem is, and always was, the Indian mentality. I could write a book about that, but I won't go into details here. Let me just say that, although my nationality is Indian, I belong to one of the numerous minority races. Numbering less than a million, we are concentrated in the remote state that I mention from time to time and we have little in common with mainstream India. My command of Hindi *may* just barely qualify as "smattering".

Online shopping for consumer goods, including end-user electronic products, has seen a boom in recent years, but not for components. Farnell/Element14 amd RS do have Indian outlets, but their declared targets are manufacturers, business houses and the like, not individuals. They require a business tax registration and that precludes hobbyists, students, young engineers who want to practice on their own, etc. Besides, their prices are ridiculous - 5 to 100 times that in the local markets, and most of their offerings seem to be stocked in the UK.

Several robotics enthusiasts have been running online parts shops for some time now. Kudos to them, but their range of general electronic components is extremely limited. I can go through their entire range in a few minutes.

Ok ok, I'll end my rant now.

You need Digikey or Mouser. They give good service for any quantity.

Digikey is in the top 10 now, around $1.5 billion sales. I think they are smart to service small orders; people buy a few parts for protos and just let Purchasing buy more for production.

Someone told me about a European country where you need a government license to buy parts from a distributor.

Hmm. How's the shipping from the other side of yonder mountains? (aka China)

e.g. Ali Express and such.

Tim

Den onsdag den 29. april 2015 kl. 23.50.52 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

I've never heard of needing license, but a lot of distributer don't want to deal with people that doesn't have a VAT number (unless you ask nicely) I don't know if it is a paperwork thing or they just don't think individuals that doesn't have a company is worth the effort

-Lasse

No, I don't know but it's certainly a possibility for at least some of the lower volume, higher cost, products. I can imagine they're getting subsidized for eval kits, and such.

As a low volume customer I totally love DK. Surfing as I do on the trailing edge of technology, DK is the only supplier that always gives me EOL notices. And then their search engine... why would I want any of that to go away?

George H.

I bet Indian customs is an issue. They used to have stupidly high import duties on parts - 40% or something like that. Not sure if that's still true. Looks like 15%-ish for semiconductors (usually free in most countries), and 17% for resistors, but if there are countervailing or dumping duties that would be on top.

Still, that wouldn't be much at Chinese prices if you could wait a few weeks for delivery (?).

--sp

The last few orders from China arrived in a few days. God knows how. They did come from China.

Most small packets from there get marked as a gift, thus mostly bypassing customs duties here.

NT

Some of us would be interested.

A lot of stuff is obtainable via amazon here, I don't suppose junglee is of use there.

NT

How hard is it to get a tax registration?

Sometimes it's good for a hobbyist to take the first steps toward starting a business, one can never tell how nicely that might play out.

How hard is it to get a VAT number?

Like I said to Pimpom, sometimes it's good for a hobbyist to take the first steps toward a business, one doesn't know how well might eventually work out.

Maybe its different in the US, here it would be crazy.

NT

for a simple single man company, it's free you just print and fill out a form.

But you'll then have to report on and outgoing VAT every month, if it is always zero they'll eventual ask questions and possibly close the company. if it always outgoing and no incoming, i.e. you want money back they will quickly see it as a scam to avoid paying VAT

and you might have to fill out the extended tax return and make an annual report for the company

you can have a company with out a VAT number if your company annual turnover is less than ~$7500 else must you have a VAT number

-Lasse

For a while, while I was jobless (got fired for insubordination) I invented company names to get magazine subscriptions and data books and such.

The Indian Element14 openly declare that they do not cater to individuals. I don't remember their exact wording but what I read on their site some years ago essentially said just that.

Same here - crazy. I'll expand a bit on that in other posts as appropriate.