2 months back when my panasonic fridge broke down I learnt only at 7pm night it was wasn't cooling, took 2hrs for me to figure out the reason. Another 1 hr or so to find the part online, the exact Japanese part from Murata Japan has been discontinued and was out of stock worldwide in major online semiconductor vendors . But the part number comes up in google search in import export data (which was a public info till 2016, government no longer give the info) with panasonic india importing a couple of hundred pieces in 2016 for about 600 bucks a piece.
.Next day I called up some one high up from Panasonic india who is a acquaintance I told him about the exact part number and he said there is only 1 in stock in bangalore and about 16 or so total in India, but will have to raise a complaint to get it fixed by one the outsourced service centers.
So I called the outsourced service centers after telling them about the part number they asked whether I was a Panasonic employee or former one. Took a good 5 mins to convince them the problem was due to the particular part. They said they will need 24 hrs to source the part from panasonic and it would cost 1.5k+ tax and 600 bucks has service charges+ tax it was coming to 2.5k total. By the next 5 mins I went to a local store and bought a similar spec chinese one for 100 bucks. Within 15 min the fridge was working again.
The original part from Murata lasted 8.5 years, so even if this chinese part last 1 year, it still is much cheaper to keep on replacing it.