Tag Archives: printed circuit

A Not-So Public Affair

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Jiangsu Xiehe Electronic started trading today on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The company makes flex circuits and performs SMT. That should be a big deal, since PCB manufacturers going public has become a rarity.

This is not your father’s printed circuit industry. IPOs are a novelty in our industry these days.

Moreover, almost all the IPOs of fabricators or EMS companies in the past 10 years have been in Asia.

This year, Covid be damned, Sihui Fushi Electronic Technology went public in July on the Shenzhen Exchange, and TLB is scheduled to be listed this month in Korea.

Insofar as I know, that’s it.

Last year was no better. Cal-Comp raised some capital by listing a subsidiary in the Philippines. Ventec went public in Taiwan.

Stretching back over the past decade, there are a few nuggets. But just a few.

Shennan Circuits (2017 IPO) and Zowee Technologies (2010) are public on the Shenzhen Exchange, and OK Industries (2017) is traded in Japan. And Dixon Technologies debuted in 2017 on the India Exchange.

Over in the UK, fabricator Trackwise Designs had an IPO in the UK a couple years ago. And NCAB went public in Sweden.

As private equity firms continue to consolidate fabricators and (mostly) EMS companies, as New Water Capital did with Veris and Saline Lectronics this week, the question becomes, what is their end-game? Will they amass enough revenue through M&A to make a public offering viable? Or will they try to button it up and sell to another PE firm — or perhaps an even larger manufacturer?

And is the era of the publicly traded circuit board manufacturer winding down?

What Goes Around

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Taiwanese printed circuit fabricators are feeling the pain of the currency crunch as their South Korean competitors have been taking advantage of the cheap won (and, in the cases of Samsung and LG, the home court advantage) to woo new orders.

As of today, one Taiwanese dollar is worth 38.1 won, down from a 12-month high of more than 40 won but still up 4.4% from the low. In the cutthroat world of PCB pricing, a 4% or more currency advantage is huge.

What’s interesting, however, is that Taiwan has noted South Korea’s government is intervening to keep the won cheap, which is precisely the argument the US government has made against China with its currency.

Oh, and most major Taiwanese board fabricators have plants in China. Few South Korean fabs do.

 

Is It Value? Is It Proto?

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SMT Geiger PCB

Looks like it to me. I got a couple of nice PCBs from Sunstone here. The parts, except for the Geiger tubes are here from Digi-Key too. The tubes are someplace between the Ukraine and Canby. All I have left to do is kit it up and place the order here at Screaming Circuits. It may seem silly that I have to go through the effort of placing an order on our web site when I work here. But it’s not.

Doing so does two things. It reminds me of what it’s like to be a customer. Always a good thing. And, it doesn’t disrupt the shop floor with something that is outside of our process.

In case you haven’t been following, this is my SMT re-layout of the open source Geiger counter designed by Jeff Keyzer of MightyOhm.com.

Duane Benson
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. (actually, I hope not)

http://blog.screamingcircuits.com/