Hornby R8249 Digital Chips still in stock

We still have a large amount of Hornby R8249 digital chips in stock, we heard a whisper a while back that the chips we going to be out of stock with Hornby and we managed to secure a big stock holding of the items.
Hornby current date of availability of the items is not till the end of September.

The problem apparently came about but the economic down turn and component makers stopped production and now the stock have been sold, they have found it hard to get production up to former levels to cope with demand. This has effect the supply of Hornby, Scalextric digital chip and we do not expect there to be enough of these items once more till certainly the other side of Christmas.

We have also heard that this has affected the release of many items from their 2010 releases, only last month we noticed that many items have been pushed back by an average of 2 months. Also it gives us doubts that there will be enough Scalextric sets available for Christmas.
Hornby supply problems overall have not improved over the past 3 years due to one reason or another.