Year 2020 was indeed very challenging and faced most people with situation that they have not experienced in their live so far. We lost some confidence in forecasting, pushing us to concentrate on what it is important to manage at the moment. There is no time to ask “when everything will return back to the normal situation ?”…. and the likely winner is … who will adopt faster to the new environment.
I have seen number of companies trying to cope with the current pandemic differently, trying to survive from their cache, invest, introduce new products and services, change completely their structure and policy etc. There are number of positive moves behind the downsides. Digitization, use of on-line tools, telemedicine, distant education made a huge jump to be more useful and easier to use for mass people. On the other hand, we found how much we miss in face to face communication. We value more the non-verbal conversation, that is giving us multi-level interactions, feelings that still differentiate us from artificial intelligence and inspiring us to new innovative thoughts.
EPCI European Passive Components Institute would like to thank to all our sponsors and supporters who helped us in 2020 to develop new tools to stay in touch, educate and share information about passive electronic components. We achieved close to 40K monthly visitors on our websites related to passive components, we grew our family of EPCI membership, established new database WHO is WHO in passives, event calendar, founded EPCI-Academy with e-learning courses in time of pandemic restrictions. It is a pleasure to see the list of EPCI 2020 achievements and the so positive feedback from a complete passive components supply chain that is the best motivation for us to continue in what we are doing.
As remarkable event for EPCI in 2021 will be to organize the next bi-annual 3rd international symposium PCNS purely focused to passive electronic components to be held September 7-10th, 2021 in Milano, Italy, hosted by Politecnico di Milano University. Hopefully in Autumn time 2021 the pandemic will be under control and most of travel restriction will be over so we can meet finally face to face that a number of people is looking for. The 3rd PCNS will be at least hybrid event, with preference that speakers will attend live and streamed to those under travel restrictions. In worst it can move to virtual event, we are ready for this but hope and count with the best scenario. PCNS Call for papers to be announced in January 2021.
We wish everyone happy new year and success in challenging year 2021
Tomas Zednicek
EPCI president