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Panasonic Factory Solutions is strengthening its presence in Central and Eastern Europe by centralising its customer support, engineering, service and development activities in Budapest, Hungary. As part of this strategic investment, the company has opened a significantly expanded Technical Centre, creating a regional hub with dedicated expertise to support electronics manufacturers across the region and beyond.
A New Home for Technical Excellence
The new Technical Centre complements Panasonic's broader regional strategy. The new site offers four fully equipped training and demonstration rooms, enabling Panasonic to deliver significantly more customer training, technical workshops, and hands-on education. Panasonic's Customer Experience Centre in Munich will continue to serve as the company's B2B showcase, including dedicated training facilities for customers.
The Budapest Technical Centre will feature an 860 m² shop floor with a significantly larger demonstration line equipped with Panasonic's latest SMT technologies. This includes the NPM G Series (NPM-GP/L, GW and GH), the latest ASF feeder technology for automated refilling of material, and the APC-5M AI software solution for predictive maintenance.
Increased Innovation, Training and Lifecycle Support
Beyond customer demonstrations and training, the Budapest Technical Centre also serves as a hub for Panasonic Connect Europe's Operations & Maintenance (O&M) and lifecycle support programmes. In 2022, the company successfully established its head and feeder refurbishment service in the Hungarian capital.
"As demand for our training programmes, demonstrations and engineering support continued to grow, it became clear that our previous Technical Centre no longer provided the space our customers and teams required," explains Jérôme Clouet, Senior Product Manager, Panasonic Connect Europe GmbH. "Our new Budapest facility gives us the capacity to significantly expand these activities while creating a much more realistic demonstration environment that allows customers to evaluate complete production solutions tailored to their individual manufacturing requirements."
Budapest: A Hub of Engineering Excellence
The Hungarian capital was selected for two reasons. Firstly, it's located within one of Europe's fastest-growing electronics manufacturing regions, next to a booming industrial hub in Czech and Romania. Secondly, Budapest is an established centre for engineering excellence.
"Central and Eastern Europe is one of the most dynamic regions for electronics manufacturing, particularly within the automotive and industrial sectors, and AI server board production," adds Clouet. "At the same time, Budapest offers access to an outstanding engineering community and technical talent. This combination makes it the ideal location for expanding our capabilities and supporting customers across the region."
