PCB industry reshuffle accelerates

If there is one word to describe the PCB industry in 2021, the word "polarization" is particularly apt.

A few are happy and a few are sad

On the one hand, due to the outbreak of 5G communications and terminals, new energy vehicles, energy storage and other markets, the demand for the entire circuit board industry chain is very hot, many circuit board factories show full orders, workshops running at full capacity of prosperity.

Ye Heyuan, assistant to the chairman of Jiangxi Fuchangfa said: "At present, the products of Fuchangfa are mainly mass production, and the circuit boards of consumer electronics and consumer communications account for more than 50%. At the same time, we also have some products of automotive electronics, medical devices, HDI and Mini LED board. Due to the variety of products and the large scale, the orders have been saturated for a long time, and even the state of exploding orders this year."

Liu Zhihe, general manager of Dongguan Shuoming Electronics Co LTD, said: "We have been overwhelmed with orders this year. We are in a serious saturation state and have rejected many orders due to the limited load capacity of the production line."

On the other hand, due to the continuous interference of COVID-19, shortage of containers for transportation, limited source supply and other problems, the price of copper, the upstream raw material for PCB circuit boards, continues to rise, coupled with high terminal demand, many PCB enterprises appear to increase revenue but not increase profit, and reduce orders.

In the semi-annual reports published by PCB listed enterprises in 2021, some of them achieved double growth of revenue and profit, while some PCB enterprises also showed the phenomenon of increasing revenue without increasing profit.

For the increase of income does not increase profit, most PCB enterprises are believed to be closely related to the rise of raw materials. It is understood that the main raw materials of PCB industry include copper coated plate, copper ball, copper foil, semi-cured sheet, gold salt and so on. Since April 2020, the domestic copper price has been fluctuating upward, and in the first half of this year it hit a new high in recent years.

So, the same is true of large enterprises, but what about small and medium-sized enterprises?

It is understood that, in addition to the price fluctuations of raw materials, the environmental protection department of the government is also strengthening the supervision, multiple factors make many small and medium-sized PCB enterprises profit weak or even loss orders, difficult to move, increase the speed of industry reshuffle.

"We lost money in February, May and June this year, but it was not until July and August that we started to flatten out," said Chen Shi, director of the factory. As raw materials continue to rise, we are not taking many orders now."

High demand for automation

In line with the circuit board market, PCB industry automation demand industry is also increasing.

At present, the domestic labor cost is rising, the competition is becoming increasingly fierce, improve the efficiency, reduce the cost has become an important problem faced by the circuit board company. Therefore, automatic and intelligent production is becoming the direction of PCB industry upgrading.

Sheng Long market management director Jia Changwu said that most of the current small and medium-sized circuit board factory automation production level is not high, labor is still densely distributed in the production workshop of each link, especially in the middle and back section, in the difficult industry background, "robot replacement" is the inevitable direction.

But it is worth noting that the penetration rate of robots in the circuit board industry is not high.

In fact, now circuit board factories want to fully introduce robots to complete automated output is still more difficult. Most of the existing sites of manufacturers are small, and the investment amount is also relatively large, so that many small and medium-sized PCB enterprises hope to stop.