It’s not often you get the chance to talk shop with Hayao Nakahara, Gene Weiner, Tom Kastner and David Schild. When you do, you’re best off sitting back and listening.

That was the order of the day during the PCB East conference last month. Under the auspices of another media group, I was asked to moderate a panel on the future of PCB manufacturing in North America. And while journalists are often thought of as the seers of the industry, we are, in fact, more purveyors of others’ insights, versus prognosticators in our own right.

As I told the panel, all of whom have spent some years watching market trends in the PCB industry, the alarm has been sounding for years that the North American industrial manufacturing base is being hollowed out with not much coming in to backfill it.

Over the course of an hour, we (read: they) assessed the status of the industry and, more importantly, offered their best guesses as to what will happen next.

You know when you get these gentlemen together to be prepared for provocative thoughts. They didn’t disappoint.

The North American PCB market once commanded around $10 billion annually and 30% of the global share. Today? Try $3.2 billion to $3.4 billion – just 4% of the world market. That collapse has led to a pullback in capital investment, leaving fewer material and equipment suppliers in the ecosystem.

It’s basic economics that supporting infrastructure will head where the dollars (or yuan) are.

To wit, Kastner, who spent more than a decade working for a Japanese distributor of cut sheet lamination equipment prior to launching his M&A advisory firm, wrote a blog this spring in which he posited there are now fewer than 150 PCB fabricators in North America, of which about 102 have revenues of $10 million or less. By around 2030, he predicts, more than half of those 102 companies will likely be acquired or shut down.

Perhaps surprisingly, there was little disagreement from the panel with Kastner’s assessment.

The panelists, however, saw much to be positive about. The consensus was Americans have some of the critical features for competing in the PCB market: technology and skill.

What is lacking, however, is automation and capital investment. Naka – who will visit more than 50 board shops around the world in a typical year – pointed to the full-line automation in Taiwanese and Chinese factories, which requires less labor costs. And while investment at domestic players is consistent and ramping, it is at lower levels and from a lower base than in nations such as China, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.

Amid the tariff buzz, Asian semiconductor and ODM titans such as TSMC, Samsung, Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron have announced billions of dollars in new investments in the US.

Our panel did not see foreign investment necessarily expanding to the PCB market, however, although if it does, they showed little concern it would crowd out domestic players. Instead, the consensus was that a smaller number of players would likely result in a healthier environment for those remaining.

Yet today, the whole of the US industry spend is probably less than some of the top 25 companies like Victory Giant, AT&S or Meiko will do by themselves in a given year. Given that, I asked the panel, what strategy should North American fabricators use to close the gap with their offshore competitors?

All involved agreed government policy must evolve to prioritize and recognize the PCB market as a critical industry. Yet the much-discussed tariffs were broadly seen as a disincentive to investors and ultimately destabilizing to the supply chain. Instead, Schild, who is executive director of the Printed Circuit Board Association of America, a newer entity for domestic printed circuit board manufacturers and suppliers, suggested ITAR could be expanded beyond its government and military dimensions.

Pointing to a host of critical infrastructure components – banking, energy and telecommunications, for example – Schild said that if ITAR rules encompassed those elements as well, it could boost the domestic supply chain considerably, without the uncertainty or complications posed by tariffs.

For years I’ve heard complaints that ITAR was mostly toothless and a reminder not to do the things a US company wouldn’t do anyway. To capitalize on it as a trade barrier of sorts was perhaps the most interesting – and relevant – position the panelists came up with.

There you have it: The demand signal is present among North American OEMs. And it would behoove fabricators to pressure legislators to effect government policy that incentivizes those OEMs to buy onshore. The way is there. Now we need the will.

P.S. Be sure to check out PCB Detroit, our new two-day technical conference and exhibition in June for printed circuit designers, design engineers, fabricators and assemblers.

And register now for a free webinar on flex and rigid-flex design from Dave Lackey of ASC Sunstone, taking place May 14.

Mike Buetow is president of PCEA (pcea.net); mike@pcea.net.