Not long ago, the ministry of industry and information technology issued the “specifications and conditions for the printed circuit board industry” (hereinafter referred to as “specifications and conditions”) and “interim measures for the administration of printed circuit board industry specifications and announcements”, which took effect on February 1 this year. The document specifies:
1. The standard conditions encourages the development of the printed circuit board industry, builds industrial parks with complete supporting equipment, and guides enterprises to withdraw from the city and enter the park. Strict control of the new technical level of low – capacity simply expand the printed circuit board project.
2. In terms of production scale and technology, the “specification conditions” require enterprises to have independent production, sales and service capabilities of printed circuit board products; The r&d fund shall not be less than 3% of the main business income of the enterprise in the same year, and the enterprise shall be encouraged to obtain the qualification of high-tech enterprise or the r&d institution or technology center above the provincial level; The products produced have technical patents; At the time of declaration, the actual output of the previous year shall not be less than 50% of the actual production capacity.
3. The standard conditions also put forward requirements on the per capita output value of existing enterprises, the investment scale and input-output ratio of new construction, reconstruction and expansion projects, as well as the technology of enterprises and projects. In terms of quality management, enterprises should establish and constantly improve the measurement management system, which has the ability of electrical testing, size measurement, automatic optical testing (except single panel) and other testing. Encourage enterprises to equip with high and low temperature cycle, temperature shock, hot and humid environment adaptability test ability, and through the measurement management system certification.
PCB is the mother of electronic products, also known as the printed circuit board, is an important electronic components, electronic components are the support body, is the carrier of electrical connection of electronic components. After the adoption of PCB in electronic equipment, due to the consistency of the same kind of PCB, the error of manual wiring can be avoided, and the electronic components can be automatically inserted or stuck, automatically soldered and automatically detected, which ensures the quality of electronic equipment, improves labor productivity, reduces costs and facilitates maintenance.
The global PCB industry has been growing steadily for many years. In 2018, the output value of the global PCB market reached $56.68 billion, which increased by 7.3% compared with that in 2017. It is estimated that the global PCB market scale will reach $68.8 billion in 2022, with an average annual compound growth rate of 4.0% from 2017 to 2022. In recent years, as the global electronics industry has shifted to China, the PCB industry has also shifted its focus to the mainland. Before 2000, 70% of the global PCB output value was distributed in Europe, America (mainly North America), Japan and other three regions. With the continuous transfer of production capacity, Asia has become a major global PCB supply base at present, with the total output value approaching 90% of the world, while the mainland has become the region with the highest PCB production capacity in the world.
Seen from the internal structure of PCB industry, high-end PCB products have a large growth space, among which multi-layer boards, FPC(flexible circuit board) and HDI(high-density circuit board) are the main forces in the market. In 2017, the total proportion of multilayer boards, FPC(flexible circuit board) and HDI(high density circuit board) was as high as 74%.
From the perspective of PCB demand side, the cycle of various PCB products is mainly related to the terminal demand. At present, communication base station, automobile electronics and consumer electronics are the main application fields driving the steady growth of PCB industry.
In the aspect of automotive electronics, the annual growth rate of over 15% has been maintained in recent years, which also drives the market of automotive PCB continuously upward.
In terms of communication base stations, in 2018, the three major operators will add about 500,000 4G base stations, and the total number of base stations has exceeded 4.4 million. It is expected that the total number of new base stations in 2019 will not exceed 300,000. In view of this, the three major operators are expected to invest a total of about 99 billion yuan in 4G networks in 2019, down 6 percent from 2018. Meanwhile, China’s 5G construction investment will continue to grow, reaching 705 billion yuan. Compared with 2G~4G communication system, 5G will make more use of 3000-5000mhz and millimeter wave frequency band, and at the same time require data transmission rate to be increased by more than 10 times. 5G commercial will use ultra-dense small base stations, and the number of base stations will be 2~3 times that of 4G base stations. The construction of new generation communication infrastructure will bring the demand of large area, high frequency and high level PCB.
On the aspect of consumer electronics, innovation and upgrading of high-end smart phones are the first step. Innovation on appearance and function such as comprehensive screen and 3Dsensing have directly increased the demand for FPC board. On the other hand, the service and storage market in the field of computer has started to improve, which further expands the output value of the entire computer system. Since cloud, data center and artificial intelligence all require huge storage space and powerful computing power at present, the scale of service/storage market will grow rapidly with the gradual penetration of Internet of things in the future. Computer PCB is mainly used for graphics card with 6~16 layers of multilayer board and memory chip packaging substrate requirements. The pull effect that these two consumer electronics domain produce to PCB value will continue.
The introduction of the document will be conducive to the low-end capacity reduction of the PCB industry, improve the entry threshold of the PCB industry, and significantly increase the concentration of the domestic PCB industry in the future.