Every year it seems we received a few requests for additional information from our annual Designer Salary Survey. This year was no exception.
One request asked, “I would be curious to know the salary ranges for those identified as “PCB design” only. The maximum stated in the article is unclear if it may include some of those in management, engineering or other corporate management roles.”
Ask, and you shall receive:
The news today regarding the seizure by US Customs of nearly a quarter-million counterfeit electronics devices makes me wonder: Do the various industry market research data include all those faked goods?
Consider: Some reports claim as much as $100 billion a year worth of fake electronics products is trafficked. Given that the entire consumer electronics supply chain produces about $1.2 trillion worth of products per year, and most fakes are consumer goods, that’s a pretty good chunk to add to it.
Not all fakes work, of course. For years, “salesmen” would hawk counterfeit PCs outside the doors at Nepcon China. But they were missing most of the important parts — motherboard, CPU, memory, etc. Caveat emptor to those who fell for the scam.
But what’s changing is that in many instances, the knockoffs so closely resemble the look and functionality of the originals, it’s hard even for company officials to discern. And you don’t get there without using real parts, even if they are of lesser quality.
The wildest example I know of concerned NEC. A few years back, the Japanese computer and chip company learned of a massive multinational counterfeit ring which attempted to essentially recreate the entire company! More than 50 factories in China and Taiwan were producing faked NEC PCs and consumer handhelds.
Fifty factories is a scale that’s hard to hide. That’s a lot of production lines to buy, too. It makes you wonder if they were building them on knockoff SMT equipment.
Which way is Brazil headed?
It looked up, after Foxconn decided to invest — how much is the subject of much speculation, as one report pegs it at about $500 million, another at as much as $12 billion — in new manufacturing campuses in São Paulo and elsewhere.
But Multek recently bailed, leaving the country without its largest bare board fabricator, and now Benchmark is leaving too, citing customers that were “challenged by some of the regulation challenges there.”
Brazil has eased some of its notoriously rigid (and expense) laws that taxed imports, rules designed at essentially forcing companies to build their supply chains inside the nation. It’s a tremendous potential market, with nearly 200 million residents. A few companies leaving isn’t necessarily a trend. But the flow always starts with a trickle.
Where are the next generation of good engineers going to come from?
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been asked this …. well, you can do the math.
A good friend asked me this just today. He has noticed many of the 25 to 45 year old engineers have left the SMT industry, and questioned where the new ones would come from.
My response: The same place they always have — they will be poached from other companies, or trained in house.
Twenty years ago, we had the same problems we face today regarding the availability of qualified process engineers. But we looked at it differently. Then, with the industry in its relative infancy and growing 15 to 30% per year, we accepted that hiring novice engineers and training them was simply part of the cost of doing business. Somewhere along the line (get it?) the mindset changed. We started to expect that experienced yet affordable engineers would always be available, and when they weren’t — especially after the tech meltdown, when many left for greener, less cyclical pastures — we as an industry went into a collective mode of “woe is us.”
What we forgot, however, is that the electronics industry has traditionally been self-reliant. We don’t need universities to send us mechanical and industrial engineers ready minted and prepared for action. We need to get back to recognizing that every industry has its learning curve, and we need look no further than ourselves for the solution.
It’s time to stop worrying about the next-generation of engineers and get back in the business of recruiting, mentoring and shaping the orbs as they exit college, engineering degrees in hand, into insightful and careful process engineers.
Companies that do well in this regard will have a competitive advantage over those that don’t.
And if we are lucky, we may just learn something along the way.
Benchmark’s fascination with robots is paying off not just on the assembly line but with attracting new customers, too.
The EMS company yesterday announced a deal with KeyMe, a maker of automated key-cutting kiosks that will be first deployed in 7-Eleven stores across the New York City area.
The technology itself is neat: The kiosks enable customers to scan and store a digital copy of their keys to enable the creation of a spare copy at a later time eliminating the need for a physical key in order to make a copy.
KeyMe was very clear that Benchmark’s experience with robotics played a role in winning the program. “[Benchmark’s] extensive knowledge in automation, robotics and precision cutting enabled us to develop this revolutionary product, solving an age old problem and ensuring that consumers never get locked out again,” said CEO Greg Marsh.
Benchmark has been installing a series of interactive, programmable robots called “Baxter” designed by Rethink Robotics to perform simple tasks. The human-like machine has two arms, a head and an animated face that can display a range of emotions or thoughts ranging from “I understand” to confusion. Benchmark uses them for packaging, testing and sorting.
While Baxter isn’t ready for the precision of the SMT line, at $22,000 per unit, he is very affordable. Benchmark not only uses the Baxter series, the EMS company builds them too.
Now, it would appear, Benchmark has gone the next step to leverage that knowledge toward building a new, industrial customer base. As its dependence on IBM wanes, this is an important development.
Jabil is cutting staff, but where?
The EMS company’s management this week acknowledged an ongoing restructuring — to the tune of $188 million in charges — but declined to address specific actions. “We intend to realign our manufacturing capacity and cost base to appropriately size our manufacturing footprint with current market conditions and our customers’ geographic needs. We have begun consultation with employees during the third fiscal quarter and out of respect for those employees, we shall not be providing details as to specific sites or locations under consideration at this time.”
Under repeated questioning from analysts on a conference call, CFO Forbes Alexandar did suggest that the restructuring would include plant closures. Discussing when the charges would hit, he said, “[I]t’s really to do with the timing of when we can, essentially, start closing sites or releasing employees and transferring business.”
Obviously, this information will come out, likely sooner rather than later. But it can’t help that while Jabil is trimming, Flextronics’ shuttering of several sites this year has been effectively drowned out by the announcement of a massive new operation outside of Dallas, where it will build the new Moto X smartphone. Jabil also does business with Google (which owns the former Motorola handset business), but my understanding is these tend to be prototypes, while Google performs the volume and final assembly in Fremont, CA.
We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: EMS companies don’t sit still.
Notebook ODMs, faced with falling demand and profits, are not going gently into the good night. Flextronics dumped the PC ODM business a couple years ago to concentrate on higher margin, higher growth markets. Sanmina did the same. Now Wistron is pushing into medical as well. Others are sure to follow.
What’s distressing about reports of the US military plans being hacked is not so much who is doing it (China, Russia and probably anyone else with a PC and an internet connection), but why those plans are on public networks to begin with.
As recently as February, United Business Media staff were promoting the then-upcoming Design East trade show.
Big changes and improvements were promised, and given last year’s flat turnout and buzz, they would have been a welcome shot in the arm.
We saw “would have been” because the show has been canceled, with the understated message on the website telling visitors only, “Thank you for visiting the Design East site. Unfortunately, Design East will not be held in 2013.”
The fact is, it’s really tough to do a great show in certain markets. Even Boston, which has a thriving tech community, doesn’t go out of its way to support these events. Show producers wrestle with the question over whether it makes sense to undertake the expense, effort and risk involved, especially when it might cannibalize other convention offerings.
As an event organizer that has put on shows in the Boston area in the past, we can empathize with UBM’s decision. But we also understand the fragile nature of supplier loyalty, and when you open the door for customers to go somewhere else for their needs, they usually walk through it.
Per a new report from IDTechEx, printed electronics are expected to really take off … some day.
The latest data from the research firm targets an attractive 15.3% CAGR over the next decade, mostly driven by OLEDs. That will push the overall market from just north of $16 billion today to $76.8 billion in 2023, IDTechEx says.
But what I found interesting was the market for conductive inks (see the table below). This is an area that is, in my opinion, the Holy Grail for electronics. Get it right, and we will solve all sorts of design, weight, cost and manufacturability issues.