Where excess inventory stops being clutter and starts being currency.

For years, companies have treated excess electronic components like an embarrassing secret. They get over-purchased, boxed up and quietly written off – destined for the trash, the gray market or whatever corner of the warehouse no one wants to inventory.

And according to startup founder Margaret Upshur, the bill for that silence is massive.

“We’re talking about $15 billion of chips across the whole industry getting thrown away annually,” she says. “That is the size of many very robust, full industries, just the amount that’s being thrown away.”

Figure 1. Margaret Upshur is the founder of Mobius Materials.

Upshur is CEO and founder of Mobius Materials, a woman-led Virginia-based startup building the first authenticated secondary marketplace for electronic components. Mobius already serves OEMs, EMS providers, defense manufacturers and component traders across North America, Europe and Asia.

The Semiconductor Industry Loves Efficiency – Until It Hits Surplus

Electronics companies can forecast their demand to the decimal place, but the moment a product is delayed, redesigned, canceled or simply not sold fast enough, the inventory chain breaks. Those components – often still sealed, sometimes worth millions – are treated as a sunk cost.

Upshur, who ran operations at IoT infrastructure company Particle for four years, saw the pattern firsthand.

“If you over-forecast, you’re stuck with a ton of chips you can’t offload and you take huge losses,” she says. “If you under-forecast, you’re scrambling for short-lead-time chips and diving into the gray market.”

The result? Perfectly good parts die in storage while companies on the other side of the world pay inflated panic pricing for the same thing.

‘The Drawer of Shame’

Individuals keep a junk drawer. Electronics manufacturers keep ... pallets.

“Everybody’s got the drawer of shame,” Upshur says. “But if you’re a manufacturer and you’ve got the mini pallets worth of shame … maybe you should come talk to me.”

Those pallets represent carbon waste, supply chain volatility and avoidable financial loss. Yet culturally, the industry is trained to focus forward, on what needs to be produced, rather than backward, on what was over-bought.

It isn’t malicious. It’s structural. The losses show up quietly, trickling through E&O (excess and obsolescence) lines that barely get noticed.

“On a financial statement, the E&O line doesn’t really appear,” she says. “A lot of companies don’t realize how much it’s costing them to carry this excess.”

Figure 2. Margaret Upshur and the group behind a platform that is reshaping how manufacturers resell surplus electronic components.

Fixing a Broken Market, Not Selling to One

Upshur’s solution – a liquid, anonymous marketplace for components – is built with modern tools, real price transparency and post-Covid awareness that shortages and gluts are two sides of the same coin.

She didn’t set out to build a marketplace because it was trendy. She built it because the pain was personal.

And as a founder in a sector dominated by procurement veterans, semiconductor execs and manufacturing lifers, her perspective stands out: the supply chain doesn’t need motivational speeches or sustainability slogans.

It needs infrastructure.

Mobius facilitates real spot-market price discovery by analyzing supply and demand signals across distributors, OEM listings and marketplace activity. The platform identifies a clearing price at which parts can move – giving both buyers and sellers transparent, data-driven pricing. On the supply side, they look at the volumes on the market at authorized distributors and the spot market. On the demand side, they study trends around individual categories and offers for an exact part they have in their system. Then they match those two to create a price at which parts can be bought and sold.

Privacy prevails. Buyers and sellers cannot see the party on the other end of the transaction. All transactions run through a secure escrow model, so funds aren’t released until authentication and inspection are complete, protecting both sides without adding friction.

Mobius, which has inspection hubs in Virginia and Hong Kong, performs quality tests on the parts prior to shipment to the buyer. Mobius performs risk-based authentication, including visual inspection, X-ray analysis and electrical testing where applicable. Its machine-learning models help flag potential anomalies earlier in the process (if needed). It also developed its own machine learning-based quality inspection. Buyers receive a comprehensive test report.

“Different types of parts require different types of testing. We’re checking for primarily storage type issues; moisture, oxidation. And we can detect them extremely well.”

Customers have 14 days to inspect parts themselves and can return failed devices to Mobius.

Export compliance is another strength. “A lot of people don't know the amount of regulation around who you can sell each part to. You can’t sell certain chips to some military customers, obviously. But there are kind of second-tier, third-tier level restrictions on what and who you can sell to and what forms you need to fill out to do those sales,” Upshur says.

That’s important, she asserts, because manufacturers are in the business of buying parts to build product. Their expertise is not in selling parts. Mobius handles that compliance work through managing the export-control requirements for secondary-market component sales, from screening restricted parties to ensuring proper documentation and jurisdiction checks, so manufacturers don’t need in-house expertise to safely resell inventory.

Sustainability that Works Like a Balance Sheet

On average, manufacturers recover significantly more value through resale compared to write-downs or scrapping, and they avoid the carbon and material waste associated with disposal.

Upshur is blunt about her philosophy: sustainability only succeeds when it’s profitable.

“Most of the things that are sustainable are actually about resource conservation, which is about saving money,” she says. “We can be sustainable while saving money.”

In other words, companies shouldn’t recycle parts because it’s good PR. They should recycle them because throwing away inventory is a terrible use of capital.

That shift – from moral good to financial logic – is what she believes will unlock change. Not pressure. Economics.

A Founder Who Went Home to Win

Having lived around the world for her previous jobs, when Upshur launched the business, she returned to her home state of Virginia. It made good business sense: It’s a state with a massive defense footprint and the country’s largest chip fab.

“Virginia is a great place,” she says. “It’s home of Micron, a lot of aerospace and military, pro-business regulation, and lower cost.”

Upshur named the company after the Mobius strip: a two-sided shape that is, mathematically, one continuous surface.

A loop without waste. A circle with no end.

The Bigger Picture

Whether Mobius wins the market or sparks a wave of similar efforts, the idea feels overdue. The semiconductor industry has mastered precision at the front of the supply chain; Upshur is trying to bring the same rigor to the back end.

If she’s right, sustainability won’t come from regulations or corporate messaging. It will come from the same force that drives every supply chain decision:

Profit.

And perhaps from one founder who looked at billions of dollars sitting in warehouses and thought:

What if waste didn’t have to be wasted?

Ryann Howard is managing editor of PCD&F/Circuits Assembly; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
To listen to the PCB Chat interview with Upshur, click here.