How about within the US? I have been buying from Digi-Key primarily because a very large previous company I worked ordered hundreds of millions of dollars in parts from them every year (if not billions of dollars) so it was a company I was familiar with.
I'm really sorry to bump this
ancient thread, but I've been dwelling on this post ever since I read it two months ago. I just can't stop thinking about how stupid it is. In Digikey's best year ever, they did $1.8 billion in sales. I know from working with them in the past that no single customer constitutes anywhere near 10% of their sales. In other words, it's literally impossible for any company to have spent "hundreds of millions" there, much less billions. In fact, I'm reasonably confident that no company would ever give Digikey so much as $10 million per year. Once your dollar amounts go into the tens of thousands per part, you stop using distributors like Digikey and go straight to the manufacturer.
Anyway, your stupid comment aside, I feel obliged to make a contribution to this needlessly bumped thread (sorry, I have OCD). The best resistor companies are TE Conn. and Vishay. One of the most important factors in finding quality SMD resistors is the size of the contact patch with the PCB. Better resistors have wider terminations. More importantly, you should look over the datasheets and find resistors that have 3-sided, kiln-fired inner electrodes. The cheaper resistors use conductive epoxy to hold the terminations on, and the epoxy fails and delaminates if you try to hand-solder them. As a general rule, you should never hand-solder ceramic surface-mount resistors, but if you do, make sure they have real inner electrodes. If you check the datasheet, you should see mention of screen-printed electrodes made of Palladium or Silver-Palladium.
For a total beginner, I'll just list some of the best companies in general when it comes to discretes:
- TE Conn.
- Vishay
- Bourns
- Diodes Inc. (Zetex)
- Littelfuse
- NXP (Nexperia)
- ON Semi
That's about all I can say in response to such a broad inquiry. I can tell you that TE Conn. is my favorite company overall, but they're usually the most expensive too. I also use Bourns less that I used to because they have abysmal customer service.
EDIT:
One more thing - you should always start EVERY product search on Digikey, because it has the best search engine. Digikey's parametric search and fully populated SQL database are CRITICAL to my design process. Once you find the part you want through Digikey, you can copy the item number and paste it into Mouser if you want. Mouser usually has slightly cheaper prices, but Digikey has a $3 shipping option (1st Class Mail), so for small orders, it's usually cheapest overall. My best advice is to never try and find a part on Mouser first, because their search function is a travesty. I really don't know what I'd do without Digikey. I usually spend about 10 hours per day on Digikey when I'm designing a new product. Sometimes I'll be on Digikey 20 hours per day, for 2 weeks straight, before I finally settle on the perfect part. Their parametric search is integral to my design process because I feed the component values back into LTSPICE. I'll design a product in SPICE, then look for the required components on Digikey, then feed the Digikey values back into SPICE, then go back to Digikey, etc. etc. It's like a PID loop that eventually hones in on the perfect component. At at the end of this process, there are never any choices on Digikey; there is always only one perfect item, and nothing else will work.
Btw, most SPICE software will feed your design directly into Digikey. In other words, once you finish a design, it will automatically go online to Digikey and find all the necessary parts for you. Digikey is the lifeblood of electrical engineering. If you're just starting out, I wouldn't use any other site.
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