The COVID-19 epidemic has resulted in a wave of distance teaching and working from home while encouraging huge demands for laptops and the changing of devices in advance. As such, orders for Hannstarboard, TPT-PCB, and GCE Electronics, the three largest PCB manufacturers worldwide, have been congested with these five major brands including notebooks by Lenovo which have, recently, placed numerous orders with PCB plants but their supply can only accommodate a small portion of these demands. As such, these PCB plants have not only come to welcome the peak season much earlier but have also experienced the first wave of queuing orders in decades.

 

        As indicated by an industry insider, PCB factories have, in the past few years, increasingly developed towards popular applications such as mobile phones and servers while there is barely any increased production for laptops and the production lines are even been upgraded and transferred to produce higher-end products. This has led to a decrease in supply, as well as the additional increase in production capacities for PCB for laptops.

 

        Recently, the launch of long-distance applications due to the epidemic prevention has encouraged the buying momentum for notebooks so that shipments of the five major laptop brands such as Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, and Apple have significantly increased and the demands for PCBs for notebooks have also developed simultaneously. With the lack of PCBs, the delivery of shipments is impossible and this is why these five major brands of notebooks are using every effort to drive the release of orders.

 

          Hannstarboard, GCE Electronics, Tripod-tech, TPT-PCB, and other domestic PCB factories for notebooks are heavily crammed with recent orders. The industry also indicated that this is a rare trend of queuing orders that have not been experienced in decades. Since it takes two to three weeks for PCB plants for notebooks to place scheduled orders into production for output and that the manpower at factory compounds in the mainland have replenished successively, all customers are urgently placing orders in a large scale and the overflowing queues have already been demonstrated long before the peak season arrives.

        As a result of these accelerated customer orders, Hannstarboard, the largest supplier of PCBs for notebooks with a Taiwanese capital, noted that it is already experiencing the pressure of peak season in advance and traditional peak season has arrived early. For supply production, related orders would still have to queue as long as until the end of June and it is considered that the proportion of revenue from notebook applications will reach a new high this year.

        Hannstarboard also revealed that since demands have surged so significantly from all customers, with the production capacity already overcrowd, the production capacity at the Chongqing Plant has to be fully exhausted for comprehensive utilization and the plants at Jiangyin and Wuxi also have to work in synchronization to raise the production capacities. Moreover, the production capacity at certain single spots have to be outsourced, thereby accelerating the supply to cope with the needs of customer groups as Hannstarboard works fully to accommodate the demands of major customers.

 

        For now, the revenue of PCBs for notebooks at TPT-PCB has accounted for approximately a quarter and it is considered the key manufacturer for PCBs by the plants of major companies this time. As admitted by TPC-PCB, the current situation is "like a heavy gridlock on the highway" and the plant is desperately producing all it can to meet the surge of orders and accelerate shipments. Currently, when goods are available, it is immediately taken away by customers, emphasizing how fierce the market is.

 

        GEC Electronics and Tripod-tech also mentioned, on different occasions, that the pursuit of notebook PCBs in recent days for several commercial models is extreme with tremendous demands. (News source: Economic Daily News)