Not quite 18 years ago, a pair of venture capital firms bought a small Washington fab shop named Power Circuits. The following year those two firms, Thayer Capital Partners and Brockway Moran & Partners, added Power Circuits in Santa Ana, CA, to its stable. It renamed the fabricators TTM Technologies.

Today TTM is one of the largest PCB fabricators in the world, with revenues of around $2.5 billion across 25 facilities and 30,000 employees. It made some of the largest acquisitions in industry history, and unlike some of its competitors, made those acquisitions work.

It’s not without some irony, then, that one of the former directors of Power Circuits has teamed with a venture capital fund to acquire a pair of Southern California fabricators this week. 

History repeating?

Shane Whiteside, who was general manager and director of operations at Power Circuits, rose with TTM, eventually becoming executive vice president and COO before departing the firm in 2013.

With his background, Whiteside certainly would know which plants to target on the West Coast of the US. I haven’t been through KCA Electronics, but Marcel Electronics is one of the finest shops PCD&F has had the pleasure of visiting. I’m eager to see how this evolves.