“We’re in the last minutes to rebuild PCB manufacturing in Europe”

“For Confidee, it was really good,” Koivisto said. “We were increasing our business quite a lot. Even though the market was going down, as a small player, we kept growing.”

Now moving through the early months of 2025, Koivisto believes the worst of the market downturn may be behind them. 

“I would say that we have seen the bottom of the dip,” he said. “It looks like it starts to go upwards. I can see quite a lot of new products, and prototyping is ongoing. So it looks like the last quarter of this year will be heading back to what it was like in 2022 or so.”

As a sourcing partner with an emphasis on compliance and defence, Confidee is navigating a European PCB market that has shrunk steadily over the past decades under pressure from Asia. That trend, Koivisto says, directly affects business. The company has to look beyond China, sourcing from other countries in Asia.

“Of course it has an effect,” he said. “Suppliers in Europe are smaller, and there are fewer of them. That’s why we have supply from Asian countries that are outside of China. So there are several possibilities for manufacturers to supply to Europe from outside Europe, but also outside China, and that’s been growing quite a lot.”

With Confidee’s focus on high-reliability and defence projects, Koivisto believes Europe must act swiftly to rebuild its manufacturing capability, bringing it closer to home. 

“Yes, I do actually,” he said when asked if Europe needs to reestablish its PCB manufacturing. “There is a possibility for the companies that exist to grow within the defence area, but also for new companies to establish manufacturing in Europe.”

But the clock is ticking, he warned. And education is a key missing link. 

“Nobody is educating for PCB manufacturing anymore. And soon we’ll start to have these old guys like me going into retirement. So we are in the last minutes to move back the production, because the knowledge will go into the grave—or at least into retirement.”

He also noted that compliance remains a concern. “A lot of our customers actually do not know that their PCBs might have restrictions on import from certain countries — China, in most cases — and they still import them because they don’t know the legislation. And that is a problem.”

This is also one of the reasons why Koivisto believes there is still a significant opportunity for more PCB manufacturing in Europe, especially if companies act soon. But, as Koivisto says, we’re in the final moments to bring production back. If nothing changes now, the knowledge will disappear.

As Evertiq has previously reported, Europe’s share of global PCB manufacturing has declined sharply — from 16% in 2000 to just 2.3% by 2022. The number of domestic manufacturers has followed the same downward trend, falling from 555 in 2000 to 247 by 2015, and further down to just 171 by 2021. According to research from the IPC, two-thirds of the PCBs imported to Europe originate from China.

This was not the last, nor the only, edition of Evertiq Expo in Tampere. Join us in Finland next year – on March 26, 2026.