Raspberry Pi to prioritise B2B customers due to supply chain constrains: CEO

Raspberry Pi’s CEO Eben Upton has said that the company will prioritise commercial and industrial customers over individuals owing to supply chain constrains.   

“As you would have noticed, it can be hard to buy a Raspberry Pi unit from stock at the moment. Several factors are contributing to this,” wrote Upton in a blog post.  

Upton said that the demand for Raspberry Pi products had increased sharply from 2021, and supply constraints meant backlogs for most products.  

“Right now we feel the right thing to do is to prioritise commercial and industrial customers – we’re acutely aware that people’s livelihoods are at stake,” said Upton. 

“Unfortunately this comes at the cost of constrained supply for individual customer, who might be looking to buy a small number for home projects or for prototyping,” Upton added.  

The company has been producing 5 lakh units per month, however, this hasn’t been enough to meet demand, the CEO said.  

What this means that the Raspberry Pi 4 will be in short supply among retailers, which means inflated prices for the few pieces available.  

Many tech hobbyists use Raspberry pi to learn programming, build hardware products, try edge computing and a host of other projects.  

The CEO said that there is a significant order backlog for all products, owing to resellers having their own backlogs.  

Another issue of bots scooping up little stock as it becomes available was also pointed out.  

“Where units do appear, bots often attempt to scalp stock which is then resold at higher prices elsewhere.” The CEO said.  

As of now, the company requested users to purchase the Raspberry Pi 400 or the Raspberry Pi Pico. But a clear timeline for when the Raspberry Pi4 would be available was not provided.  

Meanwhile, few sellers on e-bay were selling the $45 Raspberry Pi4 boards for as much as $100.