Taiwan’s production capacities of high-end HDI board manufacturers are in a state of high capacity utilization rates and continue to expand their capacity scale. The manufacturers are purchasing equipment in stages to meet customer demands that are based on the market demand conditions. According to the Taiwan Printed Circuit Association (TPCA), the main reason that Taiwan’s PCB manufacturers still have the opportunity to maintain growth in 2019 is due to an increase in the proportion of high-end product shipments. Also, this increase is still one of the essential factors for sustaining growth in 2020.

 

　　Although the shipments of various terminal products, including PCs, smartphones, automobiles, etc. are still in recession in 2019, the value of PCB products that are included in each terminal product may increase due to design changes. One noticeable example of this is the shift to using any-layer HDI in Chinese high-end smartphone motherboards.

 

　　According to TPCA research data, the global PCB output value in 2018 was approximately US$69.1 billion (including the back-end assembly process of flexible board components), where the output value of HDI boards accounted for approximately 14.7%. Namely, the global output value of HDI boards in 2018 was approximately US$10.1 billion. Although HDI boards are currently not the PCB products with the highest growth rate in the world, the annual compound growth rate of the output value from 2013 to 2020 is estimated to be approximately 3.1%. As compared with the global compound annual growth rate of PCBs at roughly 2.5% during the same period, the growth performance of HDI products is still better than that of the overall PCB industry.

 

　　According to the statistics, Unimicron’s shipment volume, the current largest HDI boards manufacturing factory worldwide, is approximately 11% of the world’s shipment volume of HDI boards. Other leading market share manufacturers include Compeq, T&S, TTM, ZDT, etc. Unitech, ranked seventh among these manufacturers, has a market share of approximately 5%. Also, 11 Chinese PCB factories have been listed on the market since 2015. Many of them are, thus, using publicly-raised funds to invest in constructing different projects, some of which are related to HDI boards.

 

　　In the past, most Chinese smartphones used non-any-layer HDI as motherboards. However, the Chinese high-end smartphones are successively replacing theses motherboards with Hisilicon, Qualcomm, and other high-performance mobile chips. Regardless of Snapdragon 855 Plus, Kirin 980, and subsequent Kirin 990 smartphones, they are manufactured with the 7nm process. So, they must be coordinated with any-layer HDI motherboards.

 

　  In recent years, since Chinese PCB manufacturers have already mass-produced HDI boards, they can still secure orders from some Chinese brand mobile phone motherboards. However, when the mobile phone motherboards changed in using any-layer HDI, the relatively late layout in any-layer HDI caused their competitiveness to be incomparable to that of Taiwanese manufacturers, regardless of the terms of yield or equipment depreciation cost-sharing. Namely, Taiwan’s long-established any-layer HDI production capacity is expected to increase significantly due to the full replacement of Chinese mobile phones and the failure of the Chinese PCB manufacturers to supply them in time. (News Source: Commercial Times)