According to this article in the Guardian, Premier Farnell, the electronics parts distributor who is also a UK manufacturer of the Raspberry Pi, is going to be sold to Dätwyler. Their share price immediately rose 50%, closing at just under the Swiss firm’s offer price.
Farnell itself had been on a binge, according to Wikipedia anyway, buying up electronics distributorships in Poland, India, and the US. In 2009, they bought Cadsoft, the makers of Eagle CAD software. Now they’re being sold to another distributor.
Bloomberg writes this up as being just more consolidation in an already consolidating market. What any of this will mean for the hacker on the street is anyone’s guess, but we’re putting our money on it amounting to nearly nothing. But still, now’s the time to stock up on your genuine UK-owned, made-in-UK Pis before they become Swiss-owned and made who knows where.
I don’t see any difference,
the raspberry was producted outside europe before (uk) and will be in the future (swiss)
LOL
bye
Europe != European Union
Agree but only from the financial point of view of the holding, I doubt that the production will be moved in Switzerland from UK.
They are not going to move the plant, just change the people who collect the money. In any case, most parts are probably made in the far east.
Swiss IS in Europe, just not part of the Euro (€) currency countries, or the Shengan Space treaty which defines the free transit of people and goods between it’s members..
Switzerland is part of the Shengan Space treaty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area
WTF, you also call t shengan while linking to the correct schengen.
Must be a chinese thing..
Sorry for the typo. In fact I just copied it from the parent post. I should have checked first…
Switzerland IS a part of Schengen Area. It’s not a part of EU Customs Union though, AFAIK, so while people can move freely, they can’t bring whatever they like with them. Funny way to protect from their own citizens doing groceries abroad ;-)
The Raspberry Pi is not made by PF – they organised it being made by Sony and there’s no reason to believe that it will not continue to be manufactured by Sony.
Yeah, Farnell doesn’t own or control the Pi supply line. The RPF organised some manufacturing through them, but they are essentially just another distributor.
Production of raspberry Pi is about the least concerning thing about this acquisition.
Farnell, also known as Newark & Element14 are massive electronics distributors with a catalog bigger than a phone book. I order stuff from them regularly so will be keen to see if this affects product range, price or delivery.
I wonder how it’ll end up though, Logitech is also Swiss and at first they had good quality, then they cut cost and outsourced production to a lower quality manufacturing place it seems and it all went downhill.
So that’s the risk with these things, if you have decent quality and you start rocking the boat things can go sour, Not to mention the company philosophy might move away from keeping below a certain price point and away from releasing things like the pi zero.
Would be nice to start selling the Broadcom Raspberry PI CPU component and corresponding PoP RAM/Flash components in small to medium quantity.
It would be nice for 100% compatible clones but in different form factors to start to show up in adruino style. But that is down to Broadcom…….
That is down to the Pi Foundation. Not Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi is not open hardware. They do not want competition. And the Pi Foundation gets what they want because they are major customers of Broadcom’s and because many of the Pi Foundation’s members work for Broadcom.
The Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to education; competition is completely irrelevant to their goals.
Broadcom sells to whoever wants to give them enough money, and tells anyone else to piss off. The Foundation’s contacts within Broadcom just allowed them to bypass that barrier even when they were small.
Nope. If it was irrelevant their hardware would be open. But they stopped releasing schematics and Broadcom has not been one of the reasons. They don’t want clones.
Granted, if a clone did come out at less money it would greatly erode their revenue. Which would in turn reduce the amount of money they can spend on accomplishing their goals.
My point was not about competition but about more market. I have to design product using cheap Allwinner CPU because the Broadcom CPU is impossible to buy for project with small to medium quantities, despite the fact that more and more clients use Raspberry PI to setup a demonstrator.
Is the CPU available to buy at any quantities? If they were surely someone in China would have bought minimum quantity by now and made them available or released a Raspberry Pi clone or compatible SBC.
Ah yes, right after Farnell bought Cadsoft I contacted them and asked if they were going to raise prices. They assured me they had no plans to. The rest is history.
They’re doing you a favour, giving you a reason to get away from that thing.
I wish Victorinox had bought Farnell, so I could make a joke about red Raspberry Pi’s with little blades, corkscrew, screwdriver bits, etc that fold out.
LoL
The Raspi (variants) have become the Swiss Army knife of the embedded world. :-)
My experience is that the Swiss will find some way to put their flag on it. They always do. I have freaking wool socks with the Swiss flag on them.
And probably try to over-engineer them too…
They _are_ good socks.
I hope that Farnell not suffer like ELFA in Sweden does after been bought by Dätwyler :(
They killed all the functionality in ELFA:s webpage and moved the warehouse to Holland (instead of next day delivery it’s more next month delivery now :( ).
This is what should have happened with Farnell after Brexit, if not this move
It’s about time something happened to Farnel (element 14 ) there service has slipped from over priced items that arrived 9am the next day to over priced items that sometimes don’t even arrive.
I’ve forgotten the last time a complete order arrived the next day there is ALWAYS at least one item on back order despite the website claiming they have 1000’s in stock
Interesting, Dätwyler owns already “Reichelt Elektronik” (they bought it 2010) , every maker in Germany buys from time to time electronics there, fair price and fast shipping and good hobbyist and small professional stock. So I have no worries.
it would be great, if this leads to a better Reichelt webstore.
Will Datwyler continue to operate the US plant or shut it down?