Review of 2021 PCB Industry

Due to the outbreak of the epidemic, the operation situation was greatly affected. However, as the epidemic becomes regular, the electronics industry has seen one burst of business opportunity after another. Online work and education have led to the astonishing growth of laptops and tablets. A large number of online activities have also led to the increasing demand for cloud computing. Server and Netcom products have also been booming throughout the year.

In the second half of this year, the traditional peak season has delayed by the epidemic outbreak, but the sales of iPhones are strong all the time. Automotive electronics rebounded from its long-time slump to catch up with the wave of post-epidemic recovery. Each major car factory to accelerate the spare parts to catch up with the latest business opportunities, car PCB factory is no longer too low grain rate suffered.

Looking Forward to 2022

PCB and IC board supply chain operators generally believe that the outlook is optimistic, and high-end products are in short supply. Market conditions are hot. Upstream raw materials and equipment factories are also busy. Due to the high barrier of high-end application technology, few raw material suppliers can enter into the supply chain, such as CCL upstream.  And the production capacity is almost as saturated as that of PCB plants. With expanding manufacturers clamoring for equipment manufacturers to step up, the overall outlook for orders in 2022 is pretty bright.

Oversupply of IC boards and HDI will become the new normal status

The consensus among PCB operators is that supply will not grow as fast as requests in 2021, whether it is ABF, BT, or HDI, and the higher you go, the worse it gets. The high-end products have traditionally been an arena for a few dealers. But growth in requests takes time to simmer, and what's happening now is that request at the top of the pyramid is suddenly expanding rapidly, catalyzed by multiple applications.  But there are few players in the market to supply, which is why requests are outstripping supply.

And this situation causes two phenomena at the same time. The first is to create the leading position for the advanced technology manufacturers. As leading in technology and capacity, they are the primary targets for the IC board and HDI supply chain. For the board factories, the order negotiations of relevant customers have generally extended to the third quarter or even the fourth quarter of 2022. And for HDI, some specific customers want to book the production capacity to ensure delivery for 2022. And this way of booking production capacity in advance also gradually becomes a cooperation model for the PCB factories with the upstream materials, equipment, and other cooperative factories.

The second phenomenon brought by short supply is that the laggards expect orders to overflow.  They actively expand production and hope to grab this rare opportunity to fight for the top position. According to supply chain insiders, in addition to the midsize players competing for this market, domestic manufacturers are further expanding production capacity to bet on the possibility of overtaking at a curve.

In any case, the outlook for both IC board and HDI applications in 2022 looks pretty positive at the moment, with existing strong requests and new product growth momentum.