Premier Farnell and Exar Sign Global Franchise Agreement
Fremont, CA, and London – OCTOBER 13, 2009
Premier Farnell plc (LSE:pfl), the leading multi-channel, high service distributor supporting millions of engineers and purchasing professionals worldwide, has signed a new global franchise agreement with Exar Corporation (Nasdaq: EXAR), the company powering connectivity. Based in Fremont, California, Exar is a technology leader providing highly-differentiated silicon solutions for the Interface, Power Management, Data Communications and Storage markets.
Under the agreement, Premier Farnell will stock a broad range of Exar's products, including transceivers and UARTs; power management ICs, LED drivers, LDO regulators, USBs; and communications products used in T/E Carrier and SONET/SDH applications, such as T1/E1 and T3/E3 framer combos, timing ICs, and transceivers.
"We are pleased to add Exar Corporation to our extensive semiconductor line card," said David Shen SVP and Global Head of eCommerce & Technical Marketing at Premier Farnell. "Exar's broad array of power and communications products will be invaluable to our design engineering customers as they work with the latest technologies. Premier Farnell continues to invest in multi-dimensional technical support programs to ensure that electronic design engineers around the world receive the application information and support on the latest technologies and products from suppliers like Exar as quickly and effectively as possible. This investment provides designers with immediate access to our application and solutions information online, and the opportunity to collaborate with other designers on our leading community site, element14."
"Premier Farnell has extensive global market reach, a strong web presence and an excellent reputation for customer service, which we expect will provide new opportunities for Exar to expand our global customer base," said Paul Stafford, director of global channel sales, Exar. "As a leading multi-channel high service distributor, Premier Farnell's focus on the design engineer community complements our current sales channels and will help accelerate the evaluation and adoption of Exar's products."
About Premier Farnell
Premier Farnell plc (LSE:pfl) is a leading high service, multi-channel distributor of electronic, and industrial products and specialist services throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific. It goes to market with a differentiated value proposition, world-class marketing, a stocked range of 450,000+ products, and access to 4,000,000 more items from 3,500 top manufacturers. The company has group sales of £823.1m and over 4,100 employees globally.
While global in scope, Premier Farnell recognizes the individual needs of each market and has continued to internationalize its model accordingly, trading locally under different brand names. Its primary electronics businesses trade as Farnell in the UK, India, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Newark in the US, Canada and Mexico, and Premier Electronics in China and Hong Kong. In Singapore, Malaysia, and Brazil the operation is known as Farnell Newark.
For more information visit the website at www.premierfarnell.com
About Exar
Exar Corporation delivers highly differentiated silicon, software and subsystem solutions for industrial, datacom and storage applications. For nearly 40 years, Exar's comprehensive knowledge of end-user markets along with the underlying analog, mixed signal and digital technology has enabled innovative solutions that meet the needs of the evolving connected world. Exar's product portfolio includes power management and interface components, communications products, storage optimization solutions, network security and applied service processors. Exar has locations worldwide providing real-time customer support to drive rapid product development. For more information about Exar, visit: http://www.exar.com.