Pete Shopp, Senior Vice President of Business Operations, Mouser Electronics
The future for the electronic component industry is clearly in the health sector. “When you can talk about improving someone’s health or receiving warnings about a potential health problem so that you can get things fixed or go see a doctor before your normal checkup, those are powerful consequences in a positive way for society,” Pete Shopp, senior vice president of business operations for Mouser Electronics, told Invest:.
What is your overview of the electronics industry in today’s environment?
There are challenges for our industry right now. We’re in the electronic component industry, and we had a couple of fantastic years related to some of the supply chain issues. Similar to e-commerce companies, our business boomed. In the last couple of years, though, it has slowed down.
What makes North Texas an ideal location for Mouser?
We moved from California to Texas in 1984. Originally, it was just a warehouse location. We then ended up moving our entire headquarters from California to Texas. Since then, we’ve closed the California office. Now, 100% of our U.S. business is in North Texas. It is about logistics and transportation. When we came here, it was much more affordable for real estate. The land was plentiful. But you still have the advantage of being close to a major airport. That is important because we’re unusual in that we have one warehouse serving the globe, which is a highly unusual business model, but it’s particularly appropriate for our primary customer base, which is design engineers and small manufacturers. We’re generally shipping small orders from our website, and we’re shipping globally: About 62% of our sales are international. We ship about 20,000 boxes a day all over the world. We’re processing that many orders per day.
Are there any plans to continue to expand or look into adding more on the manufacturing and logistics side in North Texas?
We just finished a new 413,000-square-foot addition. It’s a separate, second building and we’re now in the process of building the equipment and everything on the inside. We’re hopeful that we will be able to start moving some of our processes there around August, when we’ll be able to start occupying it. We have made a huge investment in Mansfield with this new building. It’s by far our largest expansion ever.
What trends are you following and trying to stay ahead of in your sector?
Like many other companies, we’re trying to see how we can use AI to make our supply chain even more resilient. We want to understand it and the knowledge that can be created, so that we can then use that information to make intelligent decisions, make them quicker, and make them more accurate. We’re doing that, and we’re doing some things with machine learning. Of course, being in electronics, that’s where most of our customers are.
I also see so much is going on in terms of becoming more and more health-related. It is things like sensors and chemical reactions. You can do so many tests now right at home. That’s just going to become more and more prevalent. Who could imagine George Jetson on my wrist right here with my Apple Watch, where it’s measuring my heart rate, it measures my sleep, besides talking on it, and getting my email and everything else? You just see technology being such a part of our lives in more and more ways every day. You hear a lot about the negatives of technology, but when used the right way, it’s powerful. When you can talk about improving someone’s health or receive warnings about a potential health problem so that you can get things fixed or go see a doctor before your normal checkup, those are powerful consequences in a positive way for society.
How are you attracting, retaining, and developing your talent?
We have a full range of jobs here. We have 1,500 warehouse workers, but we have another 1,200 in corporate-type jobs. That could be everything from people answering the phone to finance and marketing. We do our programming for our website and our IT infrastructure from here. We have a full range of roles that we’re able to fulfill here. There is a pretty large electronics ecosystem, so we’re able to find people with experience.
Our HR recruiting team has a good relationship with some of the universities nearby, so we’re able to tap into those. We’ve also done some work with Tarrant County College, to give students with a two-year degree a pathway. Some of them are coming here part-time while they’re still in school and then join us full-time later on. It’s nice to be able to take advantage of these local resources.
What are your top priorities for the next two to three years?
No. 1 is to get our warehouse up and operational. We have our headquarters here in Texas, but we do have facilities globally. We have found that sales grow when we set up customer service locations internationally. We’re always evaluating what country we should go into next. We have a couple on the list that we’re considering and evaluating. We’ll continue to expand globally to grow our business, shipping from Mansfield to the world.
We are also looking at some adjacent product lines that we can get more involved in, and expanding to add additional suppliers to our distribution model. We currently have 1,200 manufacturer brands that we distribute to our 650,000-plus customers across the globe.
