Verical has announced the production launch of its online trading platform, dubbed Verical Marketplace, for global high tech manufacturers and distributors of electronic components. 


Introduced in beta form in January, the Verical Marketplace uses information and technology to create a pedigree scoring system for component parts available in its catalog at the company’s Web site.

In comparison to the third party auction houses and consignment sales, the Verical Marketplace permits only authorized channels and original owners of component parts to sell pedigreed inventory. 

The pedigree system assigns a score to each component part based on how far back Verical is able trace its chain of custody. Company officials said that the higher the pedigree score, the further up the supply chain the component is traceable. 

As the economy rebounds, buyers and sellers are growing vulnerable to the risks of inventory excess and shortages that drive grey market activity and increasingly sophisticated counterfeit methods.

The Verical Marketplace optimizes transactions within the industrial supply chain for sellers faced with disposing of excess inventory and buyers faced with shortage purchasing. 

Today, the electronic component secondary market is fraught with risk and inefficiencies, Stephen P. Kaufman, senior lecturer of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and former chairman and CEO at Arrow Electronics (News - Alert), said.

According to Kaufman, buyers have no visibility into the true source of their components; they can only guess at a part’s authenticity or warranty, and have incomplete information about what the part really is and what a fair price is.

Simultaneously, sellers have to worry about not getting a decent price for their surplus inventory, protecting their brands, and the hassle of not having a single place in which to sell their parts. 

“There is a significant opportunity to upgrade the entire supply chain by addressing the current flaws of the secondary market, and Verical is addressing this challenge head on,” Kaufman said.

For buyers, Verical Market offers critical information to make better decisions, including fully transparent view of pricing, availability, restriction of hazardous substances, or “RoHS,” status and delivery information. Also, the offering provides Web 2.0 technology and processes to enable quick-filtering search tools to give buyers the required information when they need.

Additionally, buyers benefit from hand-picked, trusted suppliers, which ensures that they get fully traceable parts with associated pedigrees, helping them mitigate the counterfeit threat.

In addition to providing an anonymous marketplace to protect the seller’s brand, the Verical Market also provide protection against grey market risks through controlled marketplace that only permits the trusted names in every segment of the high tech industry OEM, EMS, distribution and component manufacturers to participate.