News briefing 
In response to the outbreak of the epidemic in Taiwan, on May 19, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) announced that the Alert of Epidemic Prevention for Taiwan was elevated to number 3. Since the beginning of June, signs of cluster infection among employees were found in various companies with these epidemic developments affecting the supply chain of the electronics industry.

Impact analysis 
       Taiwan is an important production center for the electronics industry, especially within the semiconductor field. Thus, it has always played a crucial role in the world whether related to production capacity or global market shares. Though signs of cluster infections at KYEC and Greatek Electronics are not severe enough to exert a significant impact on the global supply, they have in the past raised cause for concern in the international arena. Although the semiconductor field is only a relevant industry to circuit boards, its supply and demand situation does have a direct impact on global terminal sales as it can indirectly affect the demand for other components. The best illustration of this currently is the ongoing panic for scarce chips. As such, if the signs of clustering infections cannot be controlled, it will have a degree of impact on Taiwanese industries as well as global terminal sales.

 

As far as overall circuit boards are concerned, although only about 36~37% of the revenue products are made by Taiwanese manufacturers, and most of the products can be adjusted to minimize the aforementioned impact by adjusting production capacity. However, substrate, soft boards, and other products used on notebooks are relatively sensitive to the changes in the epidemic as they have a higher proportion of production in Taiwan. For example, substrate, in particular, has more than 70% of its production in Taiwan and is regarded as one of the categories amongst all circuit board products that rely most heavily on Taiwan as its product base. However, on the bright side, a small number of cluster incidents can increase the awareness of epidemic prevention among companies, exert a positive effect on the overall industry epidemic control, and thereby help to reduce the probability of development of the epidemic into the worst-case scenario.