Golledge Electronics - Our 2020 Round Up

Golledge Electronics take our social responsibilities seriously and during our 30th anniversary year we wanted to help as many good causes as possible. 2020 therefore began with a drive to help eradicate homelessness by supporting our local shelter, Arc in Taunton, as well as national charity Crisis UK. Members of our accounts and administration team Heidi and Nic managed our effort to contribute as many shelter boxes as possible to these appeals, and our whole team took part in this effort throughout January and February to great effect.

In late March it became obvious that the country was going to have to take drastic steps to get the spread of COVID-19 under control. The week before the first lockdown of 2020 was officially announced Golledge made the largest change to working practices in our 30 year history, requiring all employees who could work from home to do so with immediate effect. This transition was achieved seamlessly due to the efficient undertaking of a herculean task by our IT department, and particularly our IT manager Mike Penny who helped to ensure that on the morning of March 23rd, the official start to the first UK lockdown, Golledge employees were already logged in from home, ready to help our customers navigate their frequency needs in this changed world.

Our employees have continued to work from home wherever possible throughout 2020 and will continue to do so whilst COVID-19 remains a threat within our communities to ensure the strength of our business. You can find out more about our changed working practices here.

Unfortunately the COVID-19 shutdown had an impact on the global supply of watch crystals, and by mid-summer demand had begun to far out-strip supply. We worked hard throughout the Summer and into Autumn to ensure that our customers were impacted by this as little as possible and we are aware that there are still some customer requests outstanding.

In addition to this turbulence within the frequency market place, in October the AKM factory in Japan suffered a devastating fire. Thankfully no one was hurt however this event has caused major disruption to the global supply of temperature compensated oscillators as AKM are a majority supplier within the TCXO IC market. This shortage has caused further knock on effects with the global supply of TCXOs now impacted. Our sales engineers have been working as hard as they can with our customers to make sure they face as small an impact as possible from this shortage. Again we're aware that some customer requests are still outstanding.

We would like to thank all of our customers for their patience and understanding during these tough times. We are working our hardest to do the best we can for you and we will continue to do so until you have the components you need.

On December 31st the transition period for the UK exiting the EU will officially come to an end, however you can rest assured that throughout 2020, despite the numerous other challenges, we have been working to actively ensure our EU customers will see very little impact from this change.

After such a full year we're very grateful to all our customers, distribution partners, and suppliers for all their support, innovation and determination throughout 2020. It's certainly been a year of change and we feel very grateful for being lucky enough to work in such a creative and caring industry. We feel sure that whatever challenges 2021 brings us, the global manufacturing industry will rise to meet them as we have done for the challenges we faced in 2020.

On that note we would like to wish all our customers, partners and suppliers a very happy, healthy and prosperous start to 2021!