At embedded world 2026, DigiKey’s message was clear: the momentum the company has predicted a year ago has materialised – and the company is doubling down on growth, innovation, and digital enablement as it looks ahead to 2026.
In 2025, DigiKey had shared a cautiously optimistic outlook, pointing to internal indicators suggesting the worst of the downturn was behind the industry. At the time, some suppliers were sceptical as they weren’t yet seeing the same momentum.
Yet DigiKey’s internal data told a different story. Key metrics – especially customer account growth, order volume, and engineering activity – were all trending upward from mid‑2024 through 2025.
Mike Slater, Vice President of Global Business Development at DigiKey noted that while revenue lagged, the “work” – measured as orders, line items (‘details’), and design activity – was already at record levels.
In hindsight, these indicators proved to be reliable early signals of the recovery and subsequent expansion.
Record growth and a million customers
DigiKey’s performance over the past year was as follows:
- 2025 revenue finished north of $3.9 billion, with double‑digit growth in all three regions
- Europe surpassed $1 billion in revenue for the first time – a milestone DigiKey sees as strategically critical
- DigiKey now serves over one million customers worldwide, and customer count grew about 7.5% last year
What stands out is how central customer count growth is to DigiKey’s strategy. Slater emphasised that even with a million customers, the company believes it is still “just scratching the surface” of its potential customer base.
In Europe alone, DigiKey serves around 200,000+ customers, leaving substantial room for expansion. This year, only a few months in, customer account growth is already in the double digits across all three regions, reinforcing the narrative of strong underlying demand.
A recurring theme was the importance of New Product Introductions (NPIs). Slater made a strong appeal to suppliers in the room to continue investing in new parts and design pipelines and keep feeding the market with innovative components.
The data backs up this emphasis:
- 25% of last year’s customers bought NPI‑related parts
- Under‑100‑piece line items – a proxy for early‑stage design and prototyping activity – have been steadily increasing over the last few years
For DigiKey, this under‑100‑piece segment is a primary indicator of engineering innovation. Rising volumes in this area signal that engineers are actively designing new products, exploring new technologies, and pushing into new markets.
Slater credited supplier partners directly: without their NPIs, DigiKey’s ability to grow its customer base and sustain innovation‑led demand would be significantly diminished.
Market signals: optimism for 2026
Turning to the broader market, Slater described 2026 as a year characterised by cautious but widespread optimism:
- Most customers are planning for mid‑ to high single‑digit growth
- Some verticals – consumer and automotive, in particular – are less optimistic going into the year
- Industrial demand is strengthening, driven heavily by AI and data centre expansion
He illustrated how AI’s impact radiates beyond chips and compute into adjacent sectors. For example: a heating and air conditioning customer reported strong business due to the cooling needs of rapidly expanding data centres.
On the supplier side, the sentiment is similarly positive:
- Suppliers began seeing positive book‑to‑bill ratios in Q3 and Q4 of last year
- A surge in orders placed inside lead time reflects heightened urgency and expectations for faster delivery
- Lead times and prices have generally been increasing, consistent with a tightening, growth‑oriented market
DigiKey’s internal indicators – presented as upward‑sloping graphs – continue to trend “up and to the right,” and Slater emphasised that the line for 2026 is even steeper than what they showed at the same time last year. The message: DigiKey entered 2026 optimistic, and performance to date has exceeded those expectations.
Meeting the needs of customers
DigiKey customers increasingly expect to see real time availability and lead times, to understand clearly when they will receive product if it is not in stock, and to be able to solve problems online without heavy manual intervention. To meet these expectations, DigiKey is pushing for deeper digital integration with suppliers, ensuring clean, timely data flows that keep systems synchronised and customer promises accurate.
Despite legal developments, tariffs remain a fact of life in the business. Slater highlighted DigiKey’s active use of Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ) structures and drawback mechanisms to mitigate costs, along with a strong desire for more suppliers to participate in or align with these FTZ strategies. The overarching goal is to minimise the impact of tariffs on customers, thereby sustaining competitiveness and demand.
As customers increasingly place orders inside traditional lead times, accurate and up to date lead time data has become critical. DigiKey’s planning processes and customer communication rely heavily on this accuracy, and rapid updates from suppliers help the company stay ahead of ordering behaviour and adjust inventory strategies accordingly.
DigiKey has long positioned itself as an inventory driven company, unafraid to stock deeply in order to seed the market. Customers, particularly design engineers working under tight timelines, expect same day shipment and high levels of on hand availability.
The digital engine behind the growth
Tim Carroll, Global Head of Digital Business at DigiKey, explained how the company’s digital platform and marketing engine are powering this growth and strengthening the bridge between suppliers and engineers.
Carroll framed DigiKey as a deeply data driven organisation, both in how it plans inventory and how it goes to market.
Looking into 2026, with more inventory on hand and complex forces like tariffs, compliance, and allocation markets at play, DigiKey is using data from its digital channels to ensure that inventory is both protected and productive. New models predict product stress and, when needed, trigger maximum order quantity limits so that stock is shared across many innovators rather than consumed by a few opportunistic buys. The aim is to ensure that design engineers can continue to access what they need, when they need it.
