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Electronics Production |

5Q/5A: Videoton's Péter Lakatos answers our questions

evertiq has started a new interview series. Today's Q&A was answered by Péter Lakatos, a Co-CEO of the Hungarian EMS-provider Videoton.


Where do you see the European EMS-industry in the next 2-3 years? We do not either dare or wish to go into prophecies. We have always had the philosophy that we are small fishermen on the broad sea, and our main advantage is adaptivity. We certainly see various trends - some of them have even opposite directions - the effects and superposition of which will define the final situation. Such trends are: - The large global EMS companies are more aggressive on smaller accounts as before. - Parallel to this, even some global customers (especially with lower spent on electronics) are pleased to buy the regional service from regionally significant, globally only mid-size companies where they receive full attention beside stability. - China's evaluation is getting more sophisticated customers evaluate their alternatives between the continents more realistically and professionally. While in case of more and more products China is getting non-evadable because of the local availability of electromechanical and other parts and components, the end-markets are more volatile, and customer demands request higher diversity, so from this point of view the chance of regional manufacturing is getting better. - In our opinion year 2010 will be the year of clearing: weaker companies will bleed to death, stronger ones will gain strength. In year 2009 customers were busy with managing themselves and maintain the appropriate supply continuity banks only studied the situation. In year 2010 will be more characterized by the redealing of the cards. - Still several Western European companies have their own internal electronics manufacturing while they purchase also from outside. They will face the "insource or full outsource" decision. There are obviously many other trends in the market but it would be far too difficult to predict their complex general effect precisely. Which segment provides the highest growth potential for you as an EMS-provider? It depends whether the question refers to absolute sense or compared to the current position. (In aeronautics, for example, we could maintain large growth even with small orders.) Due to the relative size of the market we do see a potential in all market segments. We still intend to follow the market demand and not our own preconceptions. Where do you see your own competitors? Being a vertically integrated company involved in several different end-markets, we see competitors wherever we look. It changes from business to business whether our competitor is: - China, - the customer's own internal production, - top tier global EMS companies, - the Eastern European and/or North African subsidiaries of Western European middle size companies, - the midsize Western European companies themselves. Is becoming an ODM company the way to go for EMS-providers? Certainly this is not a simply black or while question either. What we may say is that customers expect more and more precise end-market and product specific know-how and they are pleased to see design capability as a potential even if they do not utilise it at the given moment. How would you define the relationship of EMS-provider and OEM customer? We would define it as any complex customer - supplier relation where the service provider plays a major role in the life of the customer: it is a many-dimension symbiosis, where the communication is done parallel in many channels in different tone and form; and a change would mean significant investment and/or cost to both parties.

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March 15 2024 2:25 pm V22.4.5-2
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