Let them eat Pi!

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton reveals to PC Pro how the company came through component shortages

If you’ve tried to buy anything with a semiconductor inside it over the past two years, you’ll know that it has been a nightmare. Supply chain problems and shortages since the pandemic have driven many companies and customers to despair.

But then, at the end of last year, there was a glint of light at the end of the tunnel. “Supply chain update – it’s good news!” wrote Raspberry Pi founder and CEO, Eben Upton, on the company’s blog. In the post, he described a much rosier picture for 2023 supplies of the company’s wildly popular single-board computers.

So can we look forward to supplies returning to normal?

Hidden inventory pools 

The initial supply shock was one that almost every hardware firm experienced. “We had finished goods inventory, we had component inventory, and we had a pipeline,” Upton explained to PC Pro. “We were probably good through till the second quarter of 2021.”

But then problems began to emerge further down the supply chain. “What you started to see was lead time blowouts on components,” he said, adding that component deliveries that were typically expected to take 26 weeks suddenly became much longer. He recalls how some vendors, such as the manufacturers of microcontrollers, would suddenly quote him a twoyear wait for parts.

“A big lesson for us was that a 104-week lead time doesn’t mean you can have your chips in 104 weeks, it means go away,” he said with a chuckle.