News Briefing 
 

Various manufacturers are optimistic about the market conditions of Taiwan’s PCB operations this year. As the three major key players of substrates in Taiwan speed up their production expansion in the second half of the year, the industry of copper clad laminate (CCL) is also planning to carry out expansions. Furthermore, PCB equipment industries have also worked overtime, recruited more people, and found more sites for factories to hasten production and meet customer demands. It is believed that revenues will be even higher in the second half of the year.
 

Impact Analysis 
       

With strong demands for emerging applications from 5G, HPC, and the effect of the stay-at-home economy triggered by the epidemic, the PCB industry is optimistic about its trade developments. As a result, various substrate manufacturers have expanded their plans to meet market demands. This, in turn, has boosted the growth and performance of related equipment vendors. Based on the observation of overall revenue trends of 20 listed PCB-related equipment manufacturers in Taiwan, their revenue had wholly declined due to the epidemic and work being halted in the first half of 2020. However, this was restored to 2019 levels in the second half of the year. Moreover, aggregate revenue exceeded RMB 30 billion in the first half of the year - an increase of 29.3% compared to the same period of the previous year.
 

In the first half of this year, the overall performance of PCB equipment as mechanical drilling/forming machine tools was found to be outstanding. Companies like Tongtai, Dar Harng, and Taiwan Takisawa all experienced double-digit growth, and in some cases, more. Since emerging applications have driven the improvement of product specifications, servers, base stations, and other related multi-layer boards have become larger and thicker with increased numbers of through-holes, this suggests that more equipment is needed to meet increasing capacity requirements. However, higher technical thresholds are required as ABF substrate product designs are mostly small-diameter and high-AR through-holes. This is the reason that Japanese equipment manufacturers occupy a large part of the market shares. With this in mind, Taiwanese manufacturers should exert sustained and aggressive efforts in the high-end application technology gap.