OLDSMAR, Fla. — While a chip shortage impacts different industries, one local company says it’s seeing a boom in business.
Trifecta Networks ships globally, but calls Tampa home. They deal in networking and technology solutions, including certified pre-owned products.
“We are non-stop. From COVID we were an essential organization delivering technology products to healthcare organizations. So we haven’t stopped and we don’t plan on stopping,” said John Medaska, the company’s executive Vice President.
Now with the shortage, he said they’re seeing hundreds of companies they haven’t talked to before come to them.
“We put a lifetime warranty on all of our products here so that risk is overcome by that product set. So when they get that product and it gets to them overnight and it works great at half the price it’s very popular. But it’s not only growing with our customer it’s growing with people who’ve never considered it only because they can’t wait six months for their product for infrastructure,” said Medaska.
The impact of the shortage is felt across different industries though.
“Semiconductors are becoming more and more relevant the supply chain complexity is increasing,” said Gaurev Gupta, a VP analyst at Gartner.
He explained the pandemic leading to an increase in demand, U.S. and Chine trade issues, the 5G era and isolated weather events contributed, resulting in increased prices and delays in getting products for some companies.
“We’ll see price increases to go up until the end of this year and hopefully the situation’s improved by the second quarter of next year. One, because we expect some more capacity to come online so supply will be able to meet the demand and then we will see some demand saturating down,” said Gaurev Gupta, a VP analyst at Gartner.
The Consumer Technology Association explained consumers still have a strong appetite for technology.
“Consumers are gonna find really a mixed bag of availability as they’re shopping across consumer tech, even automative, appliances and so forth and they just need to be patient or be willing to go with a different brand in order to get this product now,” said Steve Koenig, the association’s Vice President of research.
Koenig said the shortage isn’t uniformly distributed across brands and categories.
“I think generally we expect an industry to really start to be able to meet this level of demand by the first part of next year. So this crisis is gonna be with us for a little bit of time. So that has implications as we look towards holiday. It’s a little early to talk about holiday shopping but in any case, just thinking about buying early or at least starting to shop early to get a view to which products are in stock,” said Koenig.
In the meantime, Trifecta is focused on getting its products out the door.
“It’s brought attention to areas we can help companies both in Tampa Bay, Florida and across North America,” said Medaska.
