While Svend Aage Kristensen’s youthful aspirations of becoming a rock star never came to fruition, Kristensen is looking like a rock star these days on the seat of a custom-painted Harley-Davidson Fatboy® motorcycle.

Kristensen won the motorcycle in a random drawing held by Digi-Key Corporation on the last day of Electronica 2006 in Munich, Germany in November.
 
As enthusiastic as Kristensen was about winning the motorcycle, Digi-Key was equally excited to present it to him at the successful culmination of its first-ever participatory trip to Electronica, a bi-annual, four-day trade show held in Munich. Pegged as the world’s leading trade show for electronic components, systems and applications, this year’s show attracted a record 78,000 attendees, 99.3 percent of them said to be experts in the electronics industry.

For Electronica 2006, Digi-Key was one of 2,961 international exhibitors, which covered an overall exhibition area of more than 1.6 million square feet of floor space spanning the New Munich Trade Fair Center’s 14 halls. The percentage of companies coming from outside Germany rose to 60 percent with a significant increase in the number of exhibitors from the USA, Great Britain, China and Hong Kong.

Prior to participating in this year’s show, Digi-Key President Mark Larson had attended the trade fair several times. “Having attended several previous exhibitions as non-participants, we were very impressed by the quality and quantity of both its exhibitors and attendees,” Larson said. “With Europe currently representing Digi-Key’s strongest region of growth, 2006 was the right time for us to debut at Electronica. While thousands of European engineers had already discovered Digi-Key’s value, our goal for this show was to prove our value to those thousands of engineers we had not yet touched. We were very pleased with the results of our presence at Electronica 2006 and expect the reverberations of our participation to be felt for quite some time in the way of new customers and interest in the products and services Digi-Key has to offer.”

Months of preparation went into planning Digi-Key’s display that featured six touch-screen workstations loaded with interactive promotional materials, providing visitors with the opportunity to learn about Digi-Key’s unique history, its broad product offering and top-ranked online order capabilities and more – everything that comprises the Digi-Key Difference. The custom-painted Harley-Davidson Fatboy® motorcycle seemed like a natural choice for Digi-Key’s Electronica 2006 give-away. Both the US-based electronic component distributor and the American motorcycle manufacturer attract loyal followings, and both have earned reputations for value and dependability.

With the largest marketing program in the industry, Digi-Key mailed more than 4.5 million catalogs in 2006. Currently, there are 36 versions of the catalog, now printed in eight languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Digi-Key presently conducts business in nine currencies with expectations of the figure increasing to 13 by the end of 2007. In addition to its catalogs, Digi-Key also hosts 22 country-specific Web sites, including its top-rated flagship Web site, www.digikey.com.

“I’m the guy from Denmark who is the lucky owner of a brand new Harley-Davidson Fatboy® bike custom made for Digi-Key,” Svend Aage Kristensen told Digi-Key. “Visiting Electronica 2006 with my firm, I was admiring the bike in your display when I got ‘caught’ by two pretty young girls who asked me to participate in a lottery. Of course, I agreed. Today, I know that Digi-Key is a worldwide distributor of nearly all kinds of electronic components.”

Kristensen, an analog hardware development engineer, also told Digi-Key of his childhood fascination for electronics. “I spent most of my time with my head stuck into old radios, so, of course, I ended up a technician,” he said. “In my spare time, I played a lot of rock music in a band. Realizing that I would never turn into a real rock star, I went back to studying.” Kristensen returned to school, graduating in 1993 with an electrical engineering degree.  For the past 10 years, the 58-year-old has been employed by TC Electronic, which is headquartered in Risskov, Denmark. Founded in 1976, TC Electronic develops and manufacturers audio products for audio professionals and musicians. Its products are marketed through a European sales staff along with sales subsidiaries in Los Angeles, Beijing and Tokyo. www.digikey.com

Keywords : Digi-Key, Digikey, Electronica

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