Tag Archives: SMTA

Making the Rounds

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We will be at several events over the next six weeks.

On Thursday, senior editor Chelsey Drysdale will attend IMAPS’ annual symposium in Long Beach, CA. There’s a number of EMS companies focused on medical electronics exhibiting and it will be interesting to hear what the latest trends are.

The following week, I will be at SMTA International, covering it for the magazine and cochairing (with CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY columnist Sue Mucha) the session “Global Strategies for Lowering EMS Costs” on Oct. 18 from 10:30-1 pm. CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY also is taking part as an exhibitor (booth 528).

On Nov. 8, I am honored to be speaking at Zuken’s US ZDAC users group meeting. We also will be out in force in mid November at Productronica, the biennial trade show to end all trade shows.

Looking forward to seeing you … somewhere.

PCB West is Back!

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Registration is open for PCB West, our annual conference for printed circuit board design, fabrication and assembly.

We have more than 50 presentations at this year’s show, which takes place Sept. 27-29 at the Santa Clara, CA, Convention Center. As with last year, several sessions on the exhibition day, Sept. 28, are free.

A big shout out to the SMTA Silicon Valley chapter, which put together the assembly tracks. Some of the proceeds will benefit the chapter.

Mark your calendars — and don’t forget to register!

PCB West: Back for More!

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Registration is open for PCB West, our annual conference for printed circuit board design, fabrication and assembly.

We have more than 50 presentations at this year’s show, which takes place Sept. 27-29 at the Santa Clara, CA, Convention Center. As with last year, several sessions on the exhibition day, Sept. 28, are free.

A big shout out to the SMTA Silicon Valley chapter, which put together the assembly tracks.

Mark your calendars — and don’t forget to register!

SMTAI: Good Times in Orlando

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SMTAI this week in Orlando was a good show. A good regional show, but a good one nonetheless. Traffic on the show floor was strong the first day, and not bad the second morning before slipping off to the usual end-of-show vacancy. The technical sessions were very strong; the session on EMS that I chaired drew about 30 folks, which is about as good as it ever does.

Not much new in the way of technology. DEK did show its ProActiv squeegee, which oscillates during the print stroke in order to pack more paste into the apertures. My old friend Phil Zarrow points out that the concept isn’t exactly new — roughly 25 years old, to be exact — but sometimes good ideas take awhile to find their place.

Tom Sharpe gave a scintillating keynote on a trip to China, showing just how systemic counterfeiting operations have become. He notes some 29,000 incidents of counterfeits were reported to the US Department of Commerce between 2005 and 2008. And he warned that the process by which some are marking fake parts now renders the ink impermeable to scratches, which means simple tests for isolating counterfeits may no longer work.

Rod Howell, founder of EMS firm Libra Industries, made an extraordinary gesture with a $5000 donation to the Charles Hutchins Grant, which underwrites the costs of a student doing post-graduate work in the fields of electronics packaging or assembly. And the SMTA has renamed its best paper award in honor of the late Rich Freiberger, a former director of the trade group and one of its most avid supporters. A nice touch.

Musical Trade Show Chairs

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Canon Communications, owner of a series of B2B magazines and trade shows, has been bought by United Business Media.

This is highly relevant because Canon partners with IPC to put on Electronics Assembly Expo, which coincidentally takes place next week. And SMTA used to partner with Reed Elsevier on that show, only to be tossed aside when Canon acquired the Chicag0-based Assembly Tech Expo show (as well as the US-based Nepcon events and several magazines) from Reed in May 2006.

Not coincidentally, CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY was owned by UBM from October 1999 to February 2002. And that gave me an front row seat to see its management in action.

It wasn’t pretty.

London-based UBM has a long history of terrible business decisions. It spent $900 million on magazine publisher CMP in October 1999, and then sold off many of the just-acquired properties for pennies on the dollar. These were magazine/trade show businesses in such fields as paper making; unglamorous, to be sure, but they just happened to be huge cash cows. But they had low topline growth, and UBM’s bet was on the high-flying tech sector, which collapsed a scant 18 months later.

Where UBM benefited was it went private when its stock was super cheap, then as the markets clawed back, it went public again. That may have been the only smart financial move the company has made in 10 years.

It is paying $287 million for Canon, a company with $106 million in revenues and $37 million in pro forma EBITDA for the fiscal year ended June 30. (Canon’s venture capital owners acquired the business in 2005 for a reported $200 million.) That’s a lot of crumpets.

While UBM corporate is good at blowing money, what its business units don’t do is partner with outside organizations. When I was there, they barely partnered with each other. Given that, I can’t see UBM continuing the relationship with IPC.

And it will be very interesting to see if that forces IPC to reopen talks with SMTA over a fall electronics trade show. If nothing else, it very likely gives SMTA the upper hand in negotiations.

Watch Me Now

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SMTA is sponsoring a contest  in which participants submit their self-produced videos in support of the SMTAI trade show and conference. Winners get free admission to certain sessions.

For info: www.smta.org/smtai/video_contest.cfm.

Trade (No) Shows

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SMTAI is over and done.  It was, in my opinion, a disappointment. While several companies remain on travel lockdown, the location — San Diego — was central to large numbers of designers and assemblers, precious few of whom bothered to make the (short) drive.

I don’t have the numbers from the SMTA yet, but my sense is the attendance for the technical conference was pretty good. But there was very little traffic on the exhibition floor, a result that mirrored IPC Midwest a few weeks earlier.

We can blame the economy. We can blame the layoffs. We can blame a lot of things. But the industry seers — also known as the media — have been saying for years there are too many shows. With Electronics New England, Electronics West, SMTA Atlanta, the myriad Design2Part shows, IPC Apex, Assembly Technology Expo, IPC Midwest, PCB West, and SMTAI, among many others, the regionalization — and bastardization — is effectively complete. There is simply no reason for a potential attendee to get excited about an event, because when you are practically showered with opportunities, the impact is dramatically lessened. (As an aside, none of this should be laid at the feet of the SMTA staff. They worked their hearts out to put on a top-notch technical conference and to this observer’s eye everything was beautifully executed. They deserved better.)

The show producers of these events are going to have to look hard at their bank accounts and reconsider their missions. While I don’t expect the for-profit companies (of which Circuits Assembly’s parent company, UP Media Group, is one) to change their approach, it’s high time the trade associations get together and get an agreement done that puts some sanity back into the trade show calendar.

Put the egos and greed aside, and get it done.