CPC/Farnell being sold

Jun 15, 2016 22 Replies

Yes, but I do spend a lot with them. Last issue was 2015 (quite early in 2015 I suspect). There's been a small supplementary catalogue of new things issued more recently this year.

Pure guess, but at this point I doubt they'd want to do a new print run of last year's catalogue, which probably means they would only have limited stock for new larger customers.

I spoke with the team which produced the RS catalogue some years ago, and it is an enormous undertaking. They used the largest Sun computer available at the time to assemble it (that was probably an E15K or E25K - I can't recall exactly when it was), so I don't underestimate the effort involved in generating a new issue.

Thank you for the feedback.

I recall Googling about Farnell's print catalogue. Not CPC Farnell but the main company now called Element 14. If I'm not mistaken, the catalogue ran to 5 volumes and was bigger than the RS catalogue.

The contract to print it was being awarded to a new printing company and this seemed significant enough to warrant an article in some printing industry newspaper.

CPC codes are two letters 6 digits sometimes plus 2 digits format. Farnell are purely numeric.

Anyway it would make price checking between the two far to easy. My last three orders of electronic bits and bobs have gone to Farnell as they were cheaper. Sometimes the price difference is quite large, think a fiver on something less than £20...

The CSS appears to be shared between the CPC and Farnell sites but the database isn't, not just prices but stock levels as well. Something with several hundred stock with say CPC can be out of stock on Farnell and have a 3 month lead time!

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