MEP EP#212: The End of Electronics Manufacturing?!

MEP EP#212: The End of Electronics Manufacturing?!

Chris Church

• Founder and current Chief Product Officer of MacroFab Inc
• The former founder of Dynamic Perception
• The former Co-Founder and Chief Architect of Alert Logic
• Was on the previous MacroFab Engineering Podcast episodes
  • #127: Tariff Impacts
  • #142: Supply Chain Conspiracy Securities

COVID-19 Outbreak in China

• Topic today is the Coronavirus or COVID-19 outbreak in China and its impact on the global Electronic Manufacturing Supply Chain
  • If you want to know more about the virus itself I suggest going to the CDC website
  • ~80% of factories in general are back to work in China, but only about 21% are fully staffed
• PCB Vendors
  • Extended holiday, workers at a lot of Chinese plants who went home weren’t allowed to come back for two weeks
  • We have lots of production in Taiwan
    • Taiwan blocked all entrance to mainland Chinese on the 5th of February, many limits still in place
    • This is causing significant delays in engineering time for new PCB orders, as most of our vendors’ engineers went back to mainland China for the holiday, and haven’t been allowed to return
  • PCBs going to Taiwan/Vietnam/Malaysia, etc.
    • As soon as delays started happening, a lot of companies sent orders over to other Asian companies, of course, this caused a fast building backlog at those companies
    • Prices going up in Taiwan, Vietnam, etc
  • FR4 is now the real problem
    • Even if production wanted to speed up in Taiwan, Vietnam, ect.. they can’t get the raw materials fast enough
• Mechanical / Custom Mfg Materials
  • This is the biggest challenge for a lot of our customers
  • Plastics and metals made in China are getting delayed by a month or more against the original lead times
  • Factories are under-staffed and backed up with big orders
• Components
  • Right now, most component suppliers are back up and running, even if under-staffed
  • Small to mid-size orders won’t be impacted much, but high-volume orders sent direct to the manufacturers are getting longer lead times and higher prices
  • Yageo is one of the vendors we’re hearing about, as of late last week pushing lead times out past a year on some bulk orders with price increases as high as 50%
  • Vishay also has several plants closed as of Monday