Analog Devices Inc's Customers Performance

Customers
We have tens of thousands of customers worldwide. No sales to an individual customer accounted for more than 10% of revenue. These customers use hundreds of different types of our products in a wide range of applications spanning the industrial, automotive, consumer and communication markets. Our largest single customer, excluding distributors, represented approximately 4% of our revenue. Our 20 largest customers, excluding distributors, accounted for approximately 34% of revenue.

We sell our products globally through a direct sales force, third-party distributors, independent sales representatives and via our website. We have direct sales offices, sales representatives and/or distributors in over 40 countries outside North America.

We support our worldwide technical direct field sales efforts by an extensive promotional program that includes editorial coverage and paid advertising in trade publications, direct mail programs, promotional brochures, technical seminars and participation in trade shows. We publish and distribute product catalogs, applications guides, technical handbooks and detailed data sheets for individual products. We also provide this information and sell products via our website. We maintain a staff of field application engineers who aid customers in incorporating our products into their products. In addition, we offer a variety of web-based tools that ease product selection and aid in the design process for our customers.

We derived approximately 55% of our revenue from sales made through distributors. These distributors typically maintain an inventory of our products. Some of them also sell products that compete with our products, including those for which we are an alternate source. In all regions of the world, we defer revenue and the related cost of sales on shipments to distributors until the distributors resell the products to their customers. We make sales to distributors under agreements that allow distributors to receive price adjustment credits and to return qualifying products for credit, as determined by us, in order to reduce the amounts of slow-moving, discontinued or obsolete product from their inventory. These agreements limit such returns to a certain percentage of our shipments to that distributor during the prior quarter.