The raspberry pi foundation has a contract with Farnell and RS that they produce the raspberry pi model A and Model B (and successors) and then get to distribute them. The foundation gets a commission (for the design) on each raspberry pi sold.
Now that things are running smoothly, and that you can count on selling around 50k raspberry pi's a month, the foundation wants to take things into their own hands, i.e. take a larger part of the profits instead of just the commission. But Farnell too is making money from the deal. So they don't like that. So now the foundation has found a "trick": They make a pi zero, organize the manufacturing of them on their own, and find their own distribution channel. Maybe Farnell is fine with this, maybe not. But in any case, the deal is that Farnell is not distributing the pi zero. Possibly later on, but not on short notice.
At least that's how I'm guessing things are behind the scenes. Sometimes I guess wrong. But on short notice: Don't hold your breath waiting for Farnell to start distributing pi zeros.
Can't see there's much money in it for them any way.
Lets hope they do something interesting in it since they are now going on about been able to produce more now, the zero although silly cheap was very limited and half the so called hacks on say Hackaday or the likes were ones that added say a usb hub or WIFI ... If you need this you should by a Pi3 not a Zero.. Use the right tool for the Job.
Personally the Zero could make some since USB OTG style peripherals for a real computer or something like that !
In this case, I think they did the right thing considering that it is still only available in limited quantities. It would have been such a waste of time for everyone adding this product to the portfolio all those months ago, setting it up for max one per customer order, given that there are better alternative products anyway - such as a Pi 3 if size is less of a concern, or something like an Intel Edison if size is a concern.
Sadly all the above still only allow one Pi Zero to be ordered, which must mean the manufacturing rate is very low.
I don't think the manufacturing rate is low. The thing is, that scaling up costs money that you have to be able to recoup by sustaining that volume. Tesla asked the world: "would there be a market for a hundred thousand model 3s?", the answer they got was: "sure, 400 thousand even!". That makes planning a production line much easier.
If the foundation would know that "there is a market for 4M raspberry pi zero boards per year for the coming 5 years" they could ask a bigger factory to build them. But they don't know that (for sure). So they are sticking with Sony-UK for producing them, and their capacity is finite. And it could very well be that part of the deal with Sony is that they make PI3's first and when time permits zero's.
