I'm a transport manager at a medium - large transport company based in the North East.. we even deliver stock into Overclockers on occasion from some of our customers on the south coast.
The uk shipping situation for ISO / Connex boxes into the uk is currently in crisis.
PPE shipments are (rightly so) taking priority and increasing the standard volumes of goods to the uk massively. Factor in the period of 2-3 months when there was basically nothing leaving chinese ports, and the expectation of customers in the uk to still be able to buy their christmas supplies (which are manufactured and shipped months in advance) and you will find the uk logistics sector is at breaking point. Does everyone remember that the whole of the chinese manufacturing industry was shut down for months? what effect do you think this has had on lead times and pricing?
The logistics situation is so bad that a number of southern ports are so congested they do not physically have the space to offload some container vessels during port calls. There were 3 ships I am aware of last week that left the uk with uk destined containers still on board! they will be calling in European ports before returning to offload later this month.
As such manufacturers have had to use air transport in many cases here they would ordinarily use sea transport.. to get product to customers in time to meet launch date commitments this adds huge amounts of cost. First they were behind in manufacture lead times due to human malware, then the world's air traffic was and still is basically shut down. a huge amount of air freight normally hitches a ride under the feet of passengers on scheduled commercial flights - the specialist air freight companies who fly cargo only planes actually make up a small percentage of air cargo in normal years. So air freight has also gotten way more expensive and way harder to even procure.
Overclockers whilst being a leading uk supplier is in the grand scheme of businesses NOT a very large company. They simply can not have staff levels and associated business infrastructure to deal with massive short term demand on hand all year round.. be it website systems, warehouse systems and even dispatch / shipping staff. I would bet that when a large launch occurs every single person in the company does extra hours, works in departments that they usually don't and basically does everything they can to get product out to customers.
Factor in staff shortages again due to human malware isolation, slower processing times due to attempting to be as covid secure as possible, increase supply cost, and it is absolutely no wonder that the current "bleeding edge" products are being sold at higher than msrp prices.
Some people have mentioned that they have made large profits in a short period.. possibly so... but these launches are not actually that regular.. operating profit has to be spread over the year to eb able to pay the fixed costs of the business which are scaled as appropriately as possible to meet "normal" customer demand.
I am personally frustrated that I couldn't secure the product i wanted at launch. I promised my son a gaming system for Christmas that would be the best it could be.. that's on me- I hope to be able to make that happen at some point before Christmas but if not i'll pull the 5700XT out of my rig and he will use it for as long as required to be able to source something suitable for him. Do i blame overclockers.. of course not. They are in the business of reselling products to consumers.. they obviously want to sell us these items because its literally how they feed their families - the wrath i have seen on this forum in the last few days is misplaced... please please go and tell AMD how you feel- they are the only ones who can actually do anything about it!
Quite honestly it is a wonder any stock has arrived in the hands of customers at this point.
I'm blown away by the level of interaction on this forum by
@Gibbo et al.. if any of you think they don't care about their customer base you are deluded.
