2010 – a great year?
15 November 2010
So, Electronica – was it good news or bad news? Is the industry in good health or still in the midst of the recession blues?
A few days at an exhibition is never going to provide a scientific answer to such questions, but my impression was that many of the recession fears, and certainly those involving a double dip, have long since receded.
I think using Electronica – principally a show for electronics designers – as a guide to the fortunes of the electronics manufacturing industry is justifiable. For all that the focus for each exhibitor will be its leading edge technologies, their presence, impact and general demeanour at the event will be dictated to by sales of their established products over the past year – and so there is a direct correlation between this and how much is being manufactured.
A slight word of caution about how I form my impression of the show. I am always inundated with invitations to see people – purely because of the job I do, not because I have an engaging and charismatic personality. This year I could have filled my schedule three times over with such invitations, which come from companies who have a positive message to convey to me. Companies who have had a bad year and have no new products are unlikely to want me to write reports about them.
So the companies I saw all have had a good year. In fact, for most of them, 2010 has been a great year and the miseries of 2009 seem a distant memory. As a generalisation the recovery is global. Asia dominates the volume growth while there is plenty of interest in the American and Western European sectors for NPI/low volume. I think the huge Munich shows generate their own enthusiasm, so Productronica last year was maybe not as gloomy as the rest of the industry in late 2009, but Electronica last week was an order of magnitude better on the optimism scale.
The optimism was also spread across most market sectors. My own experience was, for example, that automotive was one of the sectors most people wanted to talk about, which many people thought would continue to struggle with fragile customer confidence and the end of the scrappage schemes. But apparently the increase in electronic content in cars continues to drive the industry forward, most surprisingly in China and India where the (false) expectation was that the cars from these countries would be aimed at winning the low cost, low sophistication end of the market. Industrial electronics, medical and anything low power or wireless were also flavour of the day.
On the manufacturing test side I saw a number of companies whose focus remains on the modular test systems – PXI, LXI and proprietary platforms. The savings in test development time, easy migration from design to production, and redeployment of test systems remaining the drivers in this field.
Next week our US correspondent Susan Mucha will bring us her review of the autumn (I suppose I should say ‘fall’) shows in Orlando and Chicago, which should give us the American perspective on how the electronics manufacturing industry is recovering.
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