Future Electronics?

the local sales office of Future has approached me a couple times to setup an account with them... now I'm hardly a large volume purchaser of electronic components, so I'm not sure what their interest is.

Can anyone share their experiences with Future?
Do they have a printed catalog... how do you order stuff from them? Their website is harder to use than Mouser's.
How do their small-quanity prices compare to the 'little guys' like digi-key and mouser?

I wouldn't mind having another source to buy components from ... Future's line card isn't as long as digi-key or mouser, but they do carry a lot of suppliers that none of the little guys have.

Future has been a reliable supplier of components that are unavailable from other distributors. The outside sales people have been very helpful on a number of occasions. Their interest is to sell components, to small enterprises that have the potential to become large enterprises.

We have been 5-7 employees since 1994. We're not huge, we're not growing, and we're not getting rich, but we build a few, and sell a few, and we're still around. We also never had to sell our souls to the vulture capitalists. The original incorporators still own the company.

Future is different from Future-Active right?

I think Future-Active aka FAI is part of Future Electronics ... not to be confused with Futurelec

Future are really good! never had a problem with them (they also can get access to hard-to-get components)

Obviously they prefer biig manufactures but they don't mind the little-guy either

if they have offered then use them

I'm still not clear on the relationship of Future Electronics, and Future Active...

As far as Future Active goes, I recently had a look at their website, and found it quite lacking as far as modern PICs or AVRs goes. I sent an email to the address on the site, and a few days later, received an email from the president and owner of the company. He assured me that

In terms of your complaint, I wanted to let you know that we just added
6 of the most popular Microchip parts to our inventories. It is hard for us
to stock every part as every customer has different needs. However, the
good news is that we can get delivered to the store within 24-48 any part
that a customer needs, and not just Microchip.

Click to expand...

This is quite reassuring for me.

futurlec, is an Australia - Thailand based outfit, with fairly good prices on small volume, but without the huge range some of the big players have.

Regards,
Robert

Here's what I've found on the FAI - FE relationship:
https://biz.yahoo.com/ic/51/51320.html
**broken link removed**

This article perhaps explains Future's poor web catalog interface, and their dislike of the Firefox browser:
https://www.microsoft.com/canada/casestudies/futureelectronics.mspx