In Terms of Experience, a 10,000-foot View of China

Estimated reading time: 21 minutes

Weiner: Get to know the culture. Make friends. Play tough, play fair, know what your required returns are and just how far you will go to achieve them.  I can remember my first trip in the early '80s to Beijing to meet with the CCPIT, the government agency for promotion of industry and trade. I met with the minister of electronics. He put his hand around my shoulder and said, "You know, we really would like to work with you and use your products here." This is after they tried to reverse engineer a particular product and failed to copy it. I looked him right in the eye and said, "No discount." And he laughed and said, "You are a friend of China. You understand us." Eventually, we came to terms with several companies here.

Matties: It's interesting because we are also seeing Chinese equipment now coming into America.

Weiner: I just recommended to one of my clients that they buy a Chinese machine that was $150,000 here, but the competitive models, which are only made in Japan and Italy, are $350,000, and the quality of this machine is excellent. It's a Taiwan company producing the equipment in Suzhou, China. Taiwan designed, Chinese built. It’s also worth noting that the world’s largest producer of automated plating and wet process equipment for the printed circuit industry is the UCE Group in China.

Matties: I’ve talked to several American PCB representatives here, and that's what they're saying. They can buy equipment here for 30% of what you would pay in America.

Cut sheet laminator made in China

Weiner: Well, I don't know about 30%, but I can say you can get a discount of 30, 40, 50% on many things, but you have to beware, caveat emptor. Not all of it works the same or as well as the Israeli, Swiss, or German equipment.

Matties: It's interesting seeing the German equipment, for example, drills, but there's a dozen other drill manufacturers here as well, and mostly Chinese.

Weiner: Yes, but you have to look at drills two ways. You have the mass drill production with the six heads for mass drilling of holes greater than six mils (150 microns) or larger. Then you have the specialty applications where you need MLBs  x-rayed, or you want close spacing, or the versatility of a driller/router. Your best bet may still be a German, Swiss or an Italian machine. If you are looking at mass production with six spindle machines, you would find it difficult to compete with Taiwan or Chinese NC equipment.

Matties: But at some point there's a crossover. The quality is going to catch up.

Weiner: People say that, and I say people keep thinking of printed circuits and printed circuit fabrication, but they're not looking ahead to packaging instead, which may or may not contain printed circuits, as we know them today, but they're going to have some flexible substrates. They're going to have some hybrids that we've talked about. They're going to have the wafer type processing. We're going to have systems on a chip. It's all going to change. Even Dan Feinberg, an old printed circuit colleague says, "Think packaging now."

Matties: There is that mentality, but in what time frame? What are we thinking, five years, 10 years?

Weiner: It's interesting you say that. That was a dinner conversation last night with several senior Chinese and Taiwanese company officers, and they all said, "You cannot predict beyond three to five years. How do you get a return on investment if you don't know what your product will look like in five years?" So, they're playing a guessing game and trying to adapt as quickly as possible and refocus and redefine their markets. That's not easy. It’s back to the adage that cites the importance of “time to market.” Not everyone will succeed. Those that do must remember that nothing is forever. Everything has a beginning and an end. Change is inevitable.

Matties: Nobody's crystal ball has ever been accurate. It may have been lucky, but not accurate.

Weiner: Now it's only two or three years on specific items and longer on generalities or products with long lead times such as autonomous driving vehicles.

Matties: And that window is still not much of a competitive advantage considering how fast change is taking place.

Weiner: No. I wish I were 40 or 50 years younger, I would be tempted to jump in headfirst over here. These are the types of challenges I've always loved.

Matties: There's still a lot of opportunity here.

Weiner: Absolutely.

Matties: A lot of people think you had to be here 20 years ago to really find opportunity, and maybe so, but it was a different opportunity than it is today.

Weiner: There's always a challenge. I listened to the Bosch presentation yesterday, and I looked at the things that they want to do on improving reliability and measuring reliability. Especially where safety could be an issue. Where do you go? How do you do it? Then there is the challenge of the increased “data” demanded by automotive people, the reliability people, by the military, and by medical equipment makers. We saw one potential solution here yesterday over at the Orbotech booth, with remote live verification after four different types of measuring for 3D, for rotation, for size, for defects. With this system you can have a verification station anywhere in the world that prints out the data or views it live, or as you would say at  007, “Real Time.”

One hall of HKPCA

Matties: So now their customers, for all intents and purposes, can have that real-time in their factory or their office.

Weiner: It's true. One of the problems of that is going to be the cost. Many of the high-tech companies that break into this are small. I would think it will probably eventually go to the OEM or the assembly guy buying the verification and sharing that information with the supplier. We might have them there onsite in real-time at the customer's desk. That's how I would do it. But there is [probably still a lack of trust between the different fabs, EMS and OEMs.

Matties: It makes sense. You've got to follow the chain of who has the most to lose in this value chain.

Weiner: You need a new way of doing business. Not to lose, who has the most to gain? Think positive. That is an enabling process, an enabling technology. Is it commercially viable? If not, can it be made so? If so, how? Then what? Will that be the only one? No. Will there be others? Yes, but who's there first? Would it be better to be second in some cases?

Matties: What are they looking at? It's data to ensure that they're getting quality product.

Weiner: Sometimes the data seekers are creating more problems than they're solving. They're often just creating costs.

Matties: You only look at an inspection when you have something to lose.

Weiner: Well, people want reliability and verification that you're doing all the tests. And so that's adding costs and it's slowing down the process the way it's done now. This certification process is nice to go in and certify that everyone knows how to do it, but that in no way guarantees the production quality.

Matties: Exactly. It guarantees that they know how to do it on that day, in that minute, but beyond that, there can't be a guarantee.

Weiner: It guarantees they have a process that works, but does it work all the time? I'll give you an example. Take a copper plating solution. Take 1,000 gallons of electroplating solution. Divide it equally in half, and put it into equal systems, equal rectifiers, equal anodes, equal spacing, equal agitation. Take 10,000 printed circuit boards with dry film photoresist imaged for pattern plating. If you put 5,000 of the boards in one tank and plate one mil, and 5,000 in the other tank and plate one mil, then analyze the solution you will discover that they will be different, because of the processing, because of different levels of resist leeched into solution and because of different levels of heat and agitation which cannot be identical because of the dynamics of the system. But you can level the differences with technology, with pulse plating, with shields, with split rectification, with solution analysis and maintenance, but you never eliminate them.

Matties: What advice would you give to a PCB fabricator in America these days?

Weiner: Stay up to date technically. Partner with your OEM customer. Go through your EMS customer to the OEM and work together to resolve problems and design issues. Design the part for manufacturability. Get agreement on how to do it at a lower cost without endangering quality. Don't go it alone. Don't fight with it. If the EMS guy won't work with you, suggest a meeting with the other customer, or find new customers. That's what I would do.

Matties: Is there anything else you would like to talk about?

Weiner: Sure. name your topic.

Matties: All right. Gene, it's always great to catch up with you, sir. Thanks for stopping by.

Weiner: It's always a pleasure seeing you. It's fun. You enjoy this as much as I do.

Matties: I've been in this industry for 35 years now, and you're absolutely right. The thing that I really enjoy the most is being able to go out and talk to people and hear their stories.

Weiner: I do a lot of that, and you're absolutely right. Some of the stories, maybe you don't want to hear, but you hear them anyhow.

Matties: We hear them anyway. All right, sir. Thank you very much.

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