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American Made Advocacy: While Congress Debates, America’s PCB Competitors Invest Billions

The story of offshoring is all too familiar in the electronics industry. For decades, PCB manufacturing shifted overseas, taking advantage of foreign subsidies, making it difficult for U.S. companies to compete. America once boasted more than 2,000 PCB shops. Today, that number has shrunk to less than 140. This is not simply the marketplace at work. As I have said repeatedly to our elected officials in Washington, American companies are not losing to their foreign competitors; they are losing to foreign governments.

This did not happen overnight. Asian competitors, especially China, have directed their industrial policy toward market dominance.

American business tends to focus on the next quarterly earnings call while our competition focuses on the next decade.

Because of an industrial policy that includes production subsidies, state-backed tax incentives, and special economic zones, China now controls more than 60% of the PCB market. China’s designs to control supply chains don’t stop at its border. In just the past five years, China has invested almost $2 billion in Thailand and another $310 million in Vietnam.

Over the same period the U.S. investment in PCB production was $118 million. Almost all of this was through the Defense Production Act (DPA). Understanding the critical nature of PCBs, Congressional appropriators and Pentagon officials invested in three new facilities:

• Calumet Electronics opened a new facility in Michigan using DPA funds.
• GreenSource received DPA funding to upgrade its production facilities.
• TTM Technologies opened a new UHDI PCB manufacturing facility in Syracuse, New York, made possible by TTM investment and tax assistance from New York State and a grant from the Department of Defense for an extensive plant expansion.

These DPA investments prove that we can compete, but their scale is inadequate relative to the capital being deployed across Asia. If advanced PCBs are foundational to U.S. economic and national security, can an investment strategy of tens or hundreds of millions compete with an Asian PCB expansion cycle measured in billions?

We know that public action moves private capital. Policymakers should look to the CHIPS Act, which reinvigorated the American semiconductor industry by attracting more than $460 billion in private investment. The same scenario applies to the American PCB industry. American PCB manufacturers are ready to scale up to reduce the dependency on Asia, but they need supportive industrial policy, legislation, and government investment to reshore and restore capacity.

This is why PCBAA is on the ground in Washington, educating policymakers, legislators, and officials at the White House and Department of Commerce. A growing team gets better results, and we all have a role to play. From critical materials to fabrication and from assembly to OEM, every company in the PCB ecosystem benefits from smart industrial policy.

We are only a few weeks away from electing the 120th Congress. PCBAA looks forward to working with our elected officials to confront the challenges we face and turn shared ambition into lasting progress.

David Schild is execuitve director of PCBAA. This column originally appeared in the October 2026 issue of I-Connect007 Magazine.