Lol, I’m not going to sugarcoat it, things are very hard right now from a supply chain perspective and it’s definitely worrisome from a business perspective.
Here’s what we’re up against:
- Silicon Labs have told us to basically forget about 700 Series products until 2023 and that 500 Series will be tough to get until end of Q2 2022.
- If we do want 500 Series for our current switches, we can buy on the, “spot market” but that adds an extra $6 per unit (our cost… does not include tariffs on that new cost)
- One of the parts in our Dimmer switch has also been discontinued and we need to look for a replacement – I think it’s the MOSFET, which really sucks
So, it’s not looking good at all for Z-Wave in 2022. This is why there’s simply, “unknown” for many (if not all) of the statuses above.
However, all is not doom and gloom, I promise and we’ve been accounting for this for some time. In fact, we got kind of a head-start in overcoming it with ZigBee.
It was a hard realization for us given that we love Z-Wave and have always been huge fans of the protocol (still are) but with the many supply chain issues, companies never really adopting the standard, etc, we made the decision to start the process of creating our ZigBee line.
We do not have the same issues here with supply chain. In fact, the manufacturer can allocate more ZigBee products than we have demand for (right now) so we should be good.
Of course, the problem in the interim is that we are out of stock on just about everything and ZigBee is still a couple months away from production so it kind of stinks from a cashflow perspective, but we’ll be fine.
My hope is the Blue Series will take off and be more successful than the Red Series so that we don’t have that much of a ramp up in demand, but time will tell.
Anyway, hope that helps. Long story short is that times are tough right now for sure, but we’ve been in similar situations in the past (switching from our original manufacturer there was a 9mo period where there was no inventory) and have come out much stronger. I’m confident this will be the case here.