Fresh off a record-breaking year, DigiKey’s executive team took the stage at the EDS Leadership Summit in Las Vegas for their annual breakfast, delivering a confident, data-driven outlook on the semiconductor market and the distributor’s evolving strategy.
Mike Slater, Vice President of Global Business Development, and Dave Doherty, President of DigiKey, shared results that validated last year’s bold predictions – and outlined a roadmap built around digital transformation, supplier partnership, and precision scaling.
A year of vindication: 2025 results exceed forecasts
At last year’s EDS breakfast, DigiKey’s leadership stood somewhat alone in their optimism about a market recovery. Slater recalled the scepticism in the room: many attendees weren’t yet seeing the momentum that DigiKey’s proprietary indicators were signalling. Twelve months later, the numbers told the story.
DigiKey closed 2025 with double-digit revenue growth across all three of its global regions, record customer growth, record new part designs, and a record number of awards. The company’s four customer segments all grew, with its direct e-commerce channel leading the pace. For Dave Doherty, the headline number was particularly meaningful: “We crossed a million customers for the first time, and there’s no turning back. It’s only accelerating.”
That milestone was accompanied by 354,000 new customers in a single year and 14% overall growth that Doherty tied directly to two foundational factors: the right team and supplier partnership.
The forecasting engine: DigiKey’s proprietary market indicators
A centrepiece of Slater’s presentation was the set of five internal indicators DigiKey has developed to anticipate semiconductor market cycles. He walked through historical scenarios showing how these signals would have predicted the pre-COVID buildup in early 2020 and flagged the market softening as early as January 2022, months before most companies hit peak revenue.
As of April 2026, those same indicators show a flattening – but at a historically high level. “We’ve seen great revenue in 2025, even better in 2026, but there is a flattening out of what we’re seeing right now,” Slater acknowledged. “I’m not necessarily concerned with it right now, but it is something we watch pretty closely.”
Complementing this internal data, DigiKey is tracking external forecasts that remain broadly bullish. WSTS projects 26% total global semiconductor market growth for 2026, and while Slater adjusts for the distorting effect of AI and memory, the stripped-down figure still points to roughly 9% growth. Gartner is even more optimistic, forecasting 64% total semiconductor revenue growth, with an adjusted 17% when logic and memory are excluded.
Innovation remains resilient – even in an up market
One dynamic that stood out in Slater’s data: innovation activity has not stalled despite a strong demand environment. During previous up-cycles, development and prototyping activity often dipped as manufacturers shifted into production mode. Not this time.
Development board sales are up 42%, software sales are up 62%, and engineering customer counts have grown 22%, with engineering-related sales up 38%. “We are still seeing, even in the up market, innovation remain very strong,” Slater noted, pointing to DigiKey’s ongoing role as a go-to resource for engineers in the early stages of product development.
Growth is particularly strong in industrial automation, wireless, and the maker, startup, and education segments – areas that have shown consistent expansion not just in 2025 but across multiple consecutive years.
The digital transformation imperative
Doherty’s portion of the presentation zeroed in on what he described as a fundamental structural shift for DigiKey: the full transition from a catalogue-era mindset to a truly digital company. Though DigiKey launched its website in 1996 – before most consumers had heard of Amazon or Google – Doherty was candid about the gap between being “on” the web and being “of” the digital age.
“We still [felt] like a catalogue company doing business on the web,” he said. “It’s only been the last few years that we are all in. We are clearly on one side of the fence, and that’s digital.”
The transformation spans three pillars. For customers, it means faster, seamless connectivity – real-time pricing and availability, API integration, and self-service quoting. For suppliers, it means eliminating friction in the ordering, forecasting, and product data pipeline. And internally, it means replacing legacy infrastructure, including a 30-year-old proprietary operating system, with scalable platforms including a newly completed Oracle finance implementation and a redesigned data and order management architecture.
The most visible sign of this shift is DigiKey’s new automated warehouse, purpose-built to break bulk quantities into smaller, customised shipments at scale. “Lots of companies have warehouses,” Doherty said. “None of them are tailor-made to break front quantities down to smaller, customised shipments to our customers.”
Streamlining for scale: exiting the non-core
To fund and focus this transformation, DigiKey is making deliberate choices about what not to do. Doherty announced the company is phasing out support for non-catalogued products and reducing its portfolio of value-added services – not to shrink, but to redirect capacity toward higher-impact work.
“Success isn’t oftentimes about doing more,” Doherty reflected. “It’s about doing less of the wrong things to free up that friction.”
Looking ahead: “momentum to scale”
If last year’s theme was ‘momentum’, this year’s is ‘momentum to scale’. Doherty shared forward-looking targets – 8-10% customer count growth, 15% details growth, and 30% revenue growth – then revealed that through five months of 2026, DigiKey is already running at roughly 12-13% customer growth and nearly 50% ahead on revenue year-over-year.
He urged the room not to read a plateau into that figure. “Where we’re at is healthy,” he said, noting that the tougher year-over-year comparisons in the second half of 2026 will naturally moderate the percentage gains – while underlying demand remains solid.
For a company that delivered double-digit growth in every region, the message from DigiKey’s executive table was clear: the best is still ahead, and the foundation to support it is being built right now.
