From Shenzhen to Southeast Asia: The changing map of PCB production.

Accurately investigating the revenues of the world’s largest PCB fabricators is confounding: Each year is filled with mergers and acquisitions, and no public records exist for a number of fabricators because they are either privately owned or part of large corporations which do not disclose the revenues of their PCB operations. As years go by, more “estimates” creep in. As a result, the author’s confidence in the data diminishes each year. Nevertheless, the NTI-100 continues to reflect the status of the global PCB industry; its size and market trends can be deduced from the fabricators listed.

For clarification, while ranked lists often refer to the 100 largest, in this case, “100” refers to companies with printed circuit board manufacturing revenues over $100 million. A record 159 companies reached that mark in 2024, versus 134 companies in 2023.

SMTAI Women’s Leadership Program highlights how technology shifts lead to greater opportunities for those with specialized skills.

The need to develop new technologies to meet the demands of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly urgent. The manufacturing of the necessary hardware at scale presents its own set of significant challenges, however, including highly skilled labor, specialized equipment requirements, automating complex tasks, supply chain disruptions and quality control issues. Given these manufacturing challenges, applying the principles of design for excellence (DfX) from the beginning of the design process is essential.

Maintaining stable production through error and predictive detection.

As industry shifts from the Internet of things, entailing machine-to-machine (M2M) and person-to-person communication, to the Internet of everything, enabling communication between people and things on a global scale, it is necessary to build more advanced systems by integrating items beyond just things, that include people, processes, and data. For example, changes in automotives and the use of VR and AI are revealing new possibilities.