Electronic designers and small-to-medium business in India who need electronic and electrical parts and devices, now have access at the click of the mouse to the products of over 3500  global suppliers – which they can source from a single agency in the country.

Eighteen months after setting up its operations in India, UK-based global electronics distributor Farnell Electronics, counts leading manufacturers like Bosch, Honeywell and Sony among its big corporate clients here – even as hundreds of small enterprises, even individual academic researchers have come to look to Farnell’s India website http://in.farnell.com as their one stop shop for sourcing their needs from nearly half a million stocked products at three international warehouses in UK, US and Singapore.

For Indian customers, Farnell operates what it calls a ‘cross dock’ warehouse at Bangalore – a virtual entity which processes orders by quickly locating the item and shipping it from the nearest international physical warehouse. The company has grown to 7 branch offices in India – Ahmedabad, Chennai, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and New Delhi, besides its HQ, Bangalore and a sales office in Pune. 

Ravi Pagar, Managing Director Farnell Electronics India Pvt Ltd, points at the advantage of paying in rupees, and ordering as little as one needs, and prompt door delivery. The Farnell brand is widely recognized in UK and US by generations of EE students and researchers as the catalogue source for overnight delivery of orders no matter how small – even a single chip or device.

Soon after the first birthday of its India operation, Farnell has also launched a useful web resource :
Element14, ( www.element-14.com  ) is a new online technology resource and community for electronic design engineers looking for unbiased technical information and tool-focused services to enhance their design and development capabilities. Element14 uses web 2.0 functionality to facilitate interaction, collaboration and information sharing among users.
It provides a vast array of data, design tools and technology information—and the ability to collaborate with select engineers about design techniques or seek new technology developments from experts in the field.

Curious about the name?  “Element 14” is named after silicon’s elemental position on the periodic table.
( From Anand Parthasarathy, Bangalore Sep 19 2009)