This week, the Global Electronics Association published its monthly report on PCB fabrication and EMS bookings and shipments, and the numbers are extremely positive. In EMS, the three-month book-to-bill ratio stands at 1.29 for July. Year-to-date EMS bookings are at 11% over 2025. The picture is similar in PCB fabrication as well. Year-to-date bookings are up 33% over last year, and book-to-bill stands at 1.46.

The recent CMMC suspension put all of us in something of a state of shock and confusion, and I have been closely following the discussion in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) community, including vendors, customers, and cybersecurity specialists. In a memo to my clients, I shared some details for the decision. A common theme among those reasons is cost and capacity. We’ve learned that CMMC has prohibitive compliance costs, with individual bills approaching $600,000; SBA estimates above $7 billion annually across the base, that there is a severe assessor shortage; roughly 100,000+ firms need assessments from only about 100 approved organizations and that the DoD stood up a 60-day CMMC Reform Task Force to recommend a lower-barrier replacement framework.

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