Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Behzad Monfared · Chip 1 Exchange · August 2026
A components business that both sources shortages and clears excess has two customers inside the same building, and they almost never talk to each other. One signs a purchase order because a line is about to stop. The other signs a disposal because a warehouse is full. This map lays out where both sit across North America and Europe, who holds the pen in each segment, and roughly how many organizations there are. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Contract manufacturers and electronics assembly
The densest concentration of both trades in one place. They buy shortage parts constantly because their build schedule belongs to somebody else, and they sit on excess constantly for exactly the same reason. The most valuable single segment on this page and the most competed for.
Who signs: strategic sourcing manager, commodity buyer, materials manager, supply chain director, and on the excess side the operations director.
2,600 to 3,200
registered electronics assembly and contract manufacturing employers across North America and Europe
Automotive suppliers, tier one and tier two
Long qualification cycles, brutal line-down economics and the most disciplined procurement function in the market. That combination makes them slow to add a supplier and very hard to remove once added, which rewards being in the conversation early rather than being cheapest late.
Who signs: commodity manager, purchasing director, supplier quality lead, program buyer, VP of supply chain.
4,500 to 5,500
registered automotive component and systems suppliers across the two regions
Industrial automation, controls and machinery
By count the largest group here and the most fragmented. Long product lifecycles mean end of life notices bite harder than anywhere else, because a machine sold on a fifteen year service promise still needs a part that the manufacturer stopped making. That is a structural, permanent source of demand.
Who signs: materials manager, buyer or planner, engineering manager, operations director. At mid-size builders the owner still signs.
9,000 to 11,000
registered industrial machinery, automation and controls manufacturing employers across the two regions
Medical device manufacturers
The segment where a substitution is a regulatory event, not a purchasing one, so traceability and documentation matter more than price. Slower to open and unusually loyal after that, and quality assurance sits in the decision alongside procurement.
Who signs: purchasing manager, supply chain director, component or sustaining engineer, quality assurance lead.
5,500 to 6,500
registered medical device and diagnostic manufacturing employers across the two regions
Aerospace, defense and rail
Small by count, disproportionate by value. Programs run for decades on parts that went obsolete a decade ago, and counterfeit risk makes provenance the whole conversation. The hardest segment to enter and the least likely to switch away once entered.
Who signs: procurement manager, obsolescence or lifecycle manager, supply chain director, contracts lead.
2,200 to 2,800
registered aerospace, defense electronics and rail systems manufacturing employers across the two regions
The design seat, across every segment above
Worth stating as its own group, because it is the one nobody maps. The engineer who chooses the part is rarely the person who buys it, and often sits at a different site under a different address. No public register records who designs where, so this group is identified by name rather than filtered from a list, and that is exactly why it stays open.
Who signs: component engineer, hardware design lead, sustaining engineering manager, obsolescence engineer.
No public register
identified person by person inside the companies above; the difficulty is the reason the segment stays open

Where the openings are

1
Two opposite trades, two different signatures. The shortage order is signed by procurement. The excess and surplus deal is signed by operations or finance, and often at a different site. A channel pointed only at buyers reaches half the business and never learns that the other half exists inside accounts it already talks to.
2
The trigger is a week, not a quarter. An end of life notice, an allocation move or a lead time that doubles puts one named person in the market on one specific week, and out of it again a month later. Watching several thousand named accounts for that moment is mechanical work that never sleeps. A relationship channel cannot do it at that width, and a catalog cannot do it at all.
3
The person who chooses the part is not the person who buys it. Component engineering sets the bill of materials, procurement sets where it is bought, and the two sit in different buildings more often than not. Reaching one and not the other is the most common gap in this market, and closing it is a targeting problem rather than a selling one.
Built from public market data covering registered manufacturing and electronics employers across North America and Europe. Counts are banded deliberately. Registers count sites rather than companies, so a group with a design office and a plant appears twice, and the smallest firms are underrepresented everywhere.
ENQUIRER CONSULTING GROUP
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