Real Time with... electronica 2024: STARTEAM GLOBAL Meeting Challenges Head-on

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

STARTEAM GLOBAL CEO Daniel Jacob and CTO Martin Schneider speak with Pete Starkey at electronica 2024 about their global presence in China, Thailand, and Europe, and how additive manufacturing and inkjet printing are keeping this PCB manufacturer at the forefront of technology. They’re excited about sustainability, the future, and competing on the world stage.

Listen to audio interview, here, or continue reading...

Pete Starkey: It’s a great pleasure to be speaking to you. Could you give me a brief account of how the company was started and how it has evolved?

 Daniel Jacob: My dad started in the PCB industry in 1982 as a commercial director for a German PCB manufacturer, which unfortunately does not exist anymore. He then started his own company, CML, with two partners in France and Italy representing them in Germany. In the 2000s, we started the journey into Hong Kong, China, as a trading company, and in 2008, we set up our own manufacturing in Shenzhen. It was a small operation with our partner at that time with just 70 people. By 2018, we started our transformation from trading into manufacturing.

That's the key part because we changed our name from CML to STARTEAM GLOBAL. We are a global company; we have a big office in Germany with around 70 people, which includes logistics services, quality, engineering, customer service, and field support. So, that’s our core and where we come from. We’ve grown and now have around 10 locations worldwide, with three factories, as mentioned, in Sichuan, China. We have since added factories in Thailand and Brescia, Italy.

Martin Schneider: That's how we came back to Europe. With our factory in northern Italy, it’s our first footprint in Europe for manufacturing of printed circuit boards.

Starkey: What has been the benefit of being a local manufacturer in Europe?

Schneider: It's a part of our strategy, to be honest. We have a fantastic, huge customer base in Europe, and we are delighted to serve their related R&D centers during the project development process, at the very early stage of the product lifecycle.

Starkey: These are the real benefits because it allows you to form effective, close working relationships. You have face-to-face contact with them rather than dealing with someone externally.

Schneider: We do design reviews and counter proposals, and support with our experience and competency from many design studies we have done in the past including design for manufacturing (DFM) for a higher scale mass production. We can run the samples, prototypes, and design studies at our own factory in Europe. It’s an easy-going solution supporting from the design phase, the prototype manufacturing via NPI into mass production—all in-house at STARTEAM GLOBAL.

We came back to Europe so we could do our own manufacturing for samples, prototypes, quick turns, high-mix low volume (HMLV). Our strategy is to have the same materials available in Italy that we also have in Thailand and China.

We set up the item lifecycle, so that at a later stage, when we scale up, when SOP is coming, we manage the projects transfer without having another set of engineering questions and design reviews. From there, we can seamlessly transition the project to our mass production facilities in Asia (Thailand and China).

Starkey: So, the product is effectively pre-engineered?

Jacob: Correct.

Starkey: You’ve resolved all the queries, clearly establishing what materials are required so that you can pass a complete engineering package over to your larger-scale factories, and they don't have any preliminary work to do. They can go straight into production quite seamlessly.

Jacob: Absolutely. I'm really impressed with our engineering team working in the cloud. Martin has set up all the systems: engineering, quality, all the preparation for PPAPs. Everything is ready in the early stage.

It means there are not 15 or 20 questions coming to our teams. In the past few months, we’ve been handing work over in the cloud to our teams in Thailand and China, and it’s working fantastically. So, now we are expanding in Italy, investing around $3–3.5 million in more advanced equipment and inner layer, so all three locations will have the same technologies. Martin, will you talk about staying one step ahead with your team?

Schneider:  For example, I’m working on the additive manufacturing process for solder mask. We completely changed our manufacturing site in Italy to this new technology. With additive manufacturing, we apply the solder mask digitally on a large-scale inkjet printer, only where it's needed so no droplet of ink will be wasted. In terms of sustainability, it’s massive savings in terms of energy process steps and resources.

Starkey: I’ve had a direct interest in this technology since 1999. I’ve seen a lot of development from the formulators and equipment manufacturers. In the past five years, solder mask has become a reality. It’s moved on from being just a prototyping technique to being a full production technique now.

Schneider: Exactly, and that’s where we are now. I've been in the industry for 42 years, so I have seen a lot. To be honest, PCB manufacturing hasn’t changed much in the past two decades; the technology and methodology are still the same. But now with digitalization, data availability, traceability, and additive manufacturing processes, it's becoming very exciting again in this time.

Starkey: I can recall the old days of screen printing and screen making and an awful lot of material ended up down the drain with wastewater. Now, as you say, not one drop is wasted.

Jacob: You can feel the excitement, it’s amazing. We've visited the equipment manufacturer (a partnership with two German leading technology companies, Notion Systems, a manufacturer of inkjet printing systems for functional materials, and Peters Group, a full-range supplier of coating materials for electronics and PCBs worldwide)  in Italy—Thailand will be our next step. Once we master it in Italy, we scale-up at our mass production sites in Asia. With these strong partnerships, we see ourselves being leaders in technology development.

Starkey: You can use the facility in Italy to establish and qualify new processes, then feed them to your production factory, already optimized and fully qualified. You can do your development work locally.

Schneider: A customer training center is in our plan, set to launch next year at our Italian factory, FST. It will become our “masterpiece,” close to our European customers and their R&D centers.. We will do tech workshops with our customers and partners, training them on our capabilities, not only with additive technology, but also concerning digitalization, data enterprise solutions, and traceability.

With MES, for example, we’re using AI algorithms to optimize processes, so the workflows ensure the customer is getting the printed circuit board in time when it’s required to be there. This is where we are trying to bring all our projects into one factory, masterpiece it there, and then scale it up to our mass production factories as well.

Starkey: I admire that philosophy. You are setting a trend with your competitors, but by the time they realize it, you will already be a couple of steps ahead.

Jacob: The PCB industry is so competitive; it's so cost- and price-driven. To be very transparent, with the over-capacities we are facing in China, we can't compete with them. We want to be different and that's why we're investing in technology: AI, production, fine planning.

So, we just established in our China factory, now 100% planning on AI base, which is improving our output and improving our reliability on internal processes. We are first in the PCB industry to have proven 100% on AI production fine planning. We will roll out the same thing in Thailand in January and, even though it's a small operation, we will bring the same thing to Italy. We will align globally and that's where we try to find our niche.

I'll tell our customers, “I'm sorry, if the Chinese giants want to win some projects, they can do whatever price, but we want to be sustainable. For us, being sustainable is not only about the environment; it also means being long-lasting in pricing and reliability. It's a package.” The customer needs to choose what kind of business model they want. I'm telling them if you're buying from these Chinese IPO companies, they have different names, but the mindset behind it is very similar.

We are a German family-owned company. We all have advantages, and we all have challenges. We are not perfect. We all have our limitations, and that's okay. But we are aware of them, and we have a great team of experts to deal with them. Martin is one of them and is leading the technology part. We have many experts around the world, and that's where we are successful today.

Starkey: It’s a very impressive story and a very impressive process.

Jacob: Thank you. You can see this year, we have dropped about 11% in the market, but I hear that others are facing 20–25% drops, so I think we're doing okay. So, we can feel it yesterday, we had a great day here at electronica in Munich. Today and tomorrow, we are totally overbooked. We can feel that the concept we are bringing to the market is well recognized.

It's a big motivation for all of us. We have a strategy and a vision. I am very lucky, I have three kids, and my oldest son is 23 and has been working with us for four years. He moved to Thailand in April and is working in a small management role. He’s growing and learning in Thailand, but he’s very passionate about it. It’s also motivation for me to continue developing the company.

Starkey: I think it's wonderful that you have three generations in the industry and hopefully you will have further generations.

Jacob: I hope so. I'm not ready to be a grandfather yet! (laughs)

Schneider: Regarding sustainability, we have new process technologies, but we are also thinking about how we can make use of our data to give a benefit to our customers. I have been working on a tool to calculate the CO₂ footprint of our own manufactured printed circuit boards. With all the challenges, we can now present a CO₂ number caused by individual printed circuit board design. We can offer to our customers not only the form of material, the lead time and the price of a printed circuit board, they will get a CO₂ number too for each individual project—XX grams for your printed circuit board.

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