2013 Chinese New Year Creates Longer Lead Time for LCD Displays

We want to take a moment and wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. We also want to help you avoid future delays of your custom displays and standard LCD displays.

Longer Lead Time for LCD Displays

Just as you may be pushing to release new products by February or early March, the 2013 Chinese New Year, also called Spring Festival, creates delays in production of LCD displays. To complicate matters, this year’s delay will have a greater effect with longer lasting effects than any holiday factory shut down in the past. This is probably not what you want to hear, but some foresight and planning may help you reduce your pain level from severe annoyance to mere inconvenience.

These delays will apply to both custom and standard LCD displays.

2013 Chinese New Year is a yearly event that takes place this year at the start of February (2013 Chinese New Year). Off-shore manufacturing plants shut their doors and production comes to a complete halt. In the past this required us to add two or three weeks to the lead time of our customer’s LCDs. This year the lead times will be longer.

Longer lead times to begin in December

Labor shortages at manufacturing facilities will begin as early as December and increase rapidly into January with a complete shut down the first week of February. This is due to the number of employees who will leave their jobs early and travel home for longer periods of time. The reason for this early exodus of employees is that this year they are in a position to take more time away from work.

Workers, who need to travel further to get home, could start their leave of absence in December and may not return until late February. As the Chinese’s New Year draws closer, more and more workers will leave their positions. In some cases, factory personnel will be away from production lines for two to three months.

Many times these laborers do not return back to their previous job and relocate to employers closer to their home. This requires LCD manufactures to locate and train new workers; an expensive and time consuming expenditure that only adds to the lead time.

Adding to this headache is that most manufacturing plants in the US shut down for seven to fourteen days between Christmas and New Year.

             Labor shortages are already so acute in many Chinese industrial zones that factories struggle to find enough people to operate their assembly lines. Factories often pay fees to agents who try to recruit workers arriving on long-haul buses and trains from distant provinces.
                                 – New York Times March 30, 2012 (see article)

What is the Solution?

Don’t procrastinate, order your displays now and don’t wait until your MRP tells you to order. Place your PO now and claim your place in the manufacturing queue.

If your worse-case scenario of “committing too soon” is the consequence of your LCD modules arriving in the states thirty or sixty days too early, then no problem, we will hold your inventory in the US and ship when you need it.

Unlike the majority of our competitors, all our international shipments, both samples and production quantities, are shipped fed ex air. That means we receive your product within five to seven days after it leaves the factory. Compared to shipping by boat which can add an additional four to eight weeks lead time.

Two main reasons for delays in shipments via surface is the time for the boat to travel on water and the delay waiting for the shipping container to be full before it can ship.