EIPC Winter Conference 2026 Review: The Keynote Sessions

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Aix-en-Provence (pronounced “ex-ahn-pro-vonse”), a historic city and commune in the south of France, about 20 miles north of Marseille, was the pleasant venue for EIPC’s Winter Conference in early February. Industry delegates from 11 European countries, as well as from the U.S. and China, gathered at the Renaissance Hotel for a two-day programme, “Driving the Future: Innovation, Energy, and Sustainability in PCB Technology.” An added attraction was a privileged visit to the ITER fusion power project at the Cadarache research and development centre.

Newly elected EIPC President Rico Schlüter, recognised in recent years for his outstanding contribution to the establishment of Unimicron's new PCB manufacturing plants in Germany and Teltonika’s in Lithuania, welcomed delegates to the event. He also gave a keynote address.

The audience warmly applauded his acknowledgement of the longstanding dedication, commitment, and achievements of his predecessor Alun Morgan.

Schlüter’s keynote focused on the ongoing campaign to raise awareness among EU politicians to recognise, evaluate, and support the complete electronics supply chain in Europe, especially the PCB and EMS industries and their suppliers, as well as the domestic semiconductor industry. He highlighted the challenges in the raw material supply chain facing the European PCB industry in 2026.

Significant price increases in base materials and prepregs are in part a consequence of a global shortage of T-glass fibre, typically used in the high-performance laminates for complex server boards in AI-based data centres being bought-up in large quantities by major Chinese and Taiwanese PCB manufacturers. As a result, the production of T-glass is being stepped up at the expense of more commonly-use of E-glass material. Concurrently, Asian foil manufacturers are concentrating their production on specialist thin foils, again for AI applications. Additionally, there have been substantial increases in the prices of gold, copper, palladium, and nickel, putting even more pressure on European PCB production.

Schlüter hopes that when the 2026 EU Chip Act 2.0 review is published, the complete ecosystem, including PCB and EMS, might be acknowledged and some incentives and actions be offered to support our industry. He recommended that manufacturers make longer-term agreements with raw material suppliers to secure their supply chain on a realistic basis.

The session on business outlook and new opportunities was moderated by EIPC technical director Tarja Rapala-Virtanen, who introduced the time-honoured and much anticipated Custer Consulting Group Business Outlook in Europe, presented in video by Jonathan Custer.

Custer’s said the global AI boom is reshaping the semiconductor landscape, driving unprecedented growth and investment, but also straining supplies of advanced materials and exposing critical supply chain bottlenecks that might limit expansion in 2026. Material shortages and capacity shifts are key constraints, making supply chains, not demand, the defining risk for 2026. Additionally, trade wars and tariff walls are causing geopolitical fractures.

In 2025, Custer reported that the global economy experienced moderate growth, estimated at 3–3.5% in GDP, and reflecting uneven performance across regions, with United States around 2–2.5%, China around 4–4.5%, Europe between 1–2%, and strong performance in Southeast Asia, India, and Latin America. Against this background of resilient yet uneven growth, technology, renewable energy, and emerging markets were seen as key growth engines, with high costs, geopolitical uncertainty, and inflation shaping risks and opportunities worldwide.

Europe’s industrial recession continues. Germany’s manufacturing sector has been in continuing decline since mid-2022, and corporate bankruptcies are at a 10-year high. UK electronics sales are down, and France is showing slight signs of recovery after three years of decline. Custer observed that while general manufacturing continues to contract in Western Europe, the trend is toward the industrialisation of Eastern Europe, yet R&D and the manufacture of complex systems remain in Western Europe. Predictably, the defence sector, with turnover up by 13.8% and employment up by 8.6%, is performing well. “Europe’s electronics industry is shrinking in volume but growing in strategic importance,” he said.

Custer’s believes the European PCB industry is set for steady growth, supported by innovation and localised production, but that companies must navigate regulatory and geopolitical uncertainties to remain competitive. Supply chain vulnerability is a serious consideration, particularly since the European industry now has a 100% dependency on non-European materials, and prices are subject to severe inflation.

He referred to the new Teltonika PCB plant in Lithuania as an example of how a strategy of vertical integration could reverse the trend. The concept of building a complete vertically integrated ecosystem under one roof has reduced Asian supply chain reliance and increased security. 

Custer considers AI the organising principle for 2026, with global semiconductor revenue nearing $1 trillion and logic and memory prices rising by more than 30%. He expects a massive demand for infrastructure, particularly for HDI PCBs used in AI servers. AI’s impact on materials will be upstream volatility, with an oversupply of low-end products and a corresponding shortage of high-end products.

Innovation is shifting from the chip to the package and the board, and the technology frontiers he anticipates between 2026 and 2030 include 800G optical interconnects becoming mainstream, further developments in advanced packaging and chiplet functionalities, glass substrates in mass production, and 6G telecommunications based on non-terrestrial networking technologies.

Custer noted his four strategic imperatives for 2026 are to reduce single-source Asian dependency by diversifying supply, to counteract high labour costs by aggressive automation, to defend margins by passing on component price increases immediately, and to lobby the European Commission to level the playing field by addressing the inverted tariff structure on raw materials.

Dieter Weiss has been acknowledged for many years as a leading expert market researcher. He has been compiling accurate market statistics for the European EMS and PCB industries through his brands in4ma and Data4PCB. He shared his latest observations in “European insights Into PCB and EMS Market Data.”

He explained the development of the European PCB and EMS statistics and how he and Michael Gasch worked in parallel for many years, until shortly before Michael’s sad passing in 2024, when Dieter agreed to recommence management of the Data4PCB European statistics, along with his own in4ma service. Both services were financed via crowd-funding.

He presented a wealth of detailed market information. His European PCB production figures for December 2025 indicated a 12.5% increase in billings and 21.3% increase in bookings compared with 2024. Corresponding year-on-year figures are +3.7% and +15%, respectively, with 68% of companies increasing billings and 32% experiencing a reduction. On average, companies increased billings by 3.2% year over year.

There are currently 187 PCB factories in Europe, not including Russia and Belarus, belonging to 172 companies, with 248 across the whole EMEA region. In 1980, there were about 2,000 PCB companies in Europe, and even with the decline, Weiss said European industry maintained a global market share of 15–20% until 2000, after which Europe continued to lose PCB companies and market share.

Europe’s share of the world market in 2025 was estimated to be 1.97% at $1.891 billion, compared with China’s 60% at $57.631 billion, Korea’s 11.4% at $10.989 billion and Taiwan’s 9.9% at $9.466 million. North America represented 3.9% at $3.772 billion.

Weiss’s figures for PCBs produced in Europe for defence projects in 2024 totalled 219.4 million euros, with France and the UK leading the list at 73.9 million and 69.4 million, respectively. Italy contributed 33.5 million and Germany 18.0 million.

So, what is new in the PCB industry? Weiss mentioned a development for roll-to-roll flexible circuits using mechanical instead of chemical etching, offering a 92% CO₂ and energy reduction and highlighting the benefits of digital solutions in the manufacturing process.

Weiss changed the focus to EMS industry statistics, with an introduction to in4ma and its processes for collecting, collating, and reporting its market research activities.

In4ma has identified and analysed 2,303 EMS companies in Europe in 2025, with total revenues of 54.19 billion euros. Weiss said that 72% of these EMS companies have revenues of less than 10 million euros and together account for only 7.5% of the market.

Revenues collapsed in 2024 with more than 6,800 job losses, representing 3% of the workforce. Most were in Central Eastern Europe, mainly in Poland and Romania.

Weiss concluded that continuing business as usual is not the option anymore, and while other global areas are strongly growing, the European PCB and EMS industry is losing ground. Cautious, uncertain market behaviour reduces workload and creates cascading effects, leading to unstable profitability. Additionally, Europe needs a stable supply chain.

He reminded delegates that the PCB & EMS Forum 2026 is scheduled for July 8–9 in Würzburg, and this is an opportunity to analyse the situation with colleagues from the industry and to discuss the development of strategies and what to watch out for.

Mike Buetow is president of the Printed Circuit Engineering Association (PCEA), gave a presentation entitled, “Training the next generation of PCB designers.” He described PCEA as a nonprofit industry trade association, founded in March 2020 by former members of the executive board of the IPC Designers Council.

A primary objective of PCEA is to bridge the skills gap in PCB design.

Existing industry programmes, for instance, the IPC Designer Certification and CID and CID+ programs, are targeted at professionals with a minimum of two years’ experience in printed circuit design and were originally focused on the IPC-D-275 design standard for rigid printed boards and rigid printed board assemblies. The PCEA Certified Printed Circuit Designer Program was created in 2021 with the goal of educating current and future designers at all levels, from beginners to seasoned professionals, with a comprehensive curriculum focused on best practices for design engineering.  

Buetow presented the “Design Engineering Triangle,” which illustrates the three competing perspectives that must be met by today’s circuit engineer: design for solvability, design for performance, and design for manufacturability, in order to achieve success in terms of maximum placement and routing density, optimum electrical performance, and efficient, defect-free manufacturing.

He reviewed the features of each stage of the Designer Program, from circuit definition and capture, through board layout data and placement, circuit routing and interconnection, flex printed circuits, documentation and manufacturing preparation, to advanced electronics and energy movement theory.

 “Why Not AI?” came the inevitable question. AI needs context to succeed, he said, and AI design tools are physics-based, not contextual, and constraints are complicated. AI must be trained on specific customer requirements, supplier variations, and quality challenges, which are always changing, often without the designer’s knowledge. Someone commented, “But AI is intelligent automation,” which provoked the response, “Autorouters are intelligent automation, but autorouter use among designers is only about 5%!”

Buetow concluded that, although the demand for PCB design has never been greater, currently available AI is not capable of the relevant, complex decision-making required. PCB design is about constraints, and “teaching the tool” is not enough. Their Designer Program focuses on solvability, manufacturing, and understanding constraints.

After an animated Q&A session moderated by Tarja Rapala-Virtanen, delegates retired to the lounge to enjoy coffee, networking, and the opportunity to visit the table-top exhibits of the sponsors before returning to join the technical sessions of the conference, which are reported separately.

I am grateful to Kirsten Smit-Westenberg for sharing her photographs.