Europe holds a 2.5% share of a market it helped build
New data from in4ma and EMSNOW puts the global EMS and ODM industry at USD 820 billion for 2025 – and Europe's share of that figure is shrinking in relative terms even as the continent's largest players post revenue growth.
The figures came during a joint presentation by Dieter G. Weiss of in4ma and Eric Miscoll of EMSNOW at Evertiq Expo Berlin on June 18. A third speaker, Dr Mareike Haass of in4ma, addressed the European and DACH markets specifically. The presentation, titled Growth Abroad, Stagnation at Home, drew on what the presenters described as primary research – pulling directly from company registers and financial reports across dozens of countries, supplemented by confidential disclosures from private companies.
A market bigger than anyone thought
One of the opening claims was blunt: the EMS and ODM industry is substantially larger than conventional assessments suggest.
When Weiss and Miscoll began building their joint top-100 list – prompted in part by uncertainty over whether existing market research efforts would continue – they asked AI tools for a baseline figure. The response put the market somewhere between USD 570 and USD 635 billion for 2025. Their own count of the top 100 companies alone came to USD 820 billion.
"You are measuring reality," Weiss said, quoting the AI's own explanation for the discrepancy. The gap, the presenters argued, reflects how much of the industry – particularly private companies and ODMs – has been systematically undercounted in traditional estimates.
Their broader estimate, accounting for companies below the USD 100 million threshold and OEM captive production, puts the total addressable market at roughly USD 970 billion for the EMS and ODM segment alone. When combined with OEM in-house assembly, that figure rises to approximately USD 2.1 trillion.
The list will be updated, Miscoll noted. A US-based private company with half a billion dollars in revenue was discovered after the first publication. The next edition is expected in August or September.
Where the growth actually is
Of the top 100, Taiwan and China together account for 82.7% of revenues. Foxconn alone represents 31.3%. The top ten companies on the list represent 74.7% of total revenues – USD 612.6 billion out of USD 820 billion.
Europe has 32 companies on the top-100 list. The United States has 18. Together, those 50 Western companies account for just 13.9% of revenues.
"The lower part of that list, which has a lot of European companies in it, is actually still not playing the main role," Weiss said.
The growth in the top-tier companies has been overwhelmingly driven by hyperscale data centre demand. ODMs including Wistron, Quanta, Wiwynn, Foxconn, and Inventec supply directly to AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Alibaba. Wistron grew 114.9% in 2025. Wiwynn – 30% owned by Wistron but tracked separately – grew 163.9%. These are not companies building what the European EMS industry builds.
The electronics architecture for data centre hardware is fundamentally different, Weiss explained. Boards run 60 to 80 layers. BGA packages now measure 10 to 13 centimetres with 5,000 to 7,500 balls. Signal integrity requirements mean standard FR4 laminate is no longer adequate – T-glass is required instead of E-glass, and copper foil uniformity specifications have tightened accordingly. PCB manufacturers supplying this segment grew more than 50% in 2025. Manufacturers supplying standard markets grew less than 10%.
The PCB supply warning
The semiconductor shortage has been widely anticipated, Weiss argued, and the industry prepared. What it did not prepare for is a PCB allocation situation, which in4ma expects to materialise in the second half of 2026.
"Chips don't float," Weiss said. "You need PCBs as well."
Laminate manufacturers have already begun announcing allocation for standard FR4 material. Capacity for standard PCBs is shrinking as manufacturers pivot toward higher-margin data centre work. Far East PCB manufacturers, Weiss noted, serve their home markets first.
On the memory side, the picture is equally stark. According to Gartner data cited in the presentation, memory semiconductor revenues are forecast to grow 192.8% year-on-year in 2026, reaching USD 633 billion. DRAM prices are expected to rise 125%; NAND by 234%. DDR5 and HBM are where capacity is being absorbed. Legacy DDR2, DDR3, and DDR4 are being phased out.
The practical implication for European EMS companies: the semiconductors being bought in volume right now are not the ones used in most European production. And the PCBs that European manufacturers need are competing for laminate with a data centre boom that is not happening in Europe.
Europe: stagnation, not recovery
2025 was supposed to be a recovery year. It was not – at least not in Europe.
Haass presented figures from in4ma's extended dataset, now covering 986 European EMS companies. Of those, 75% – 743 companies – reported a revenue decline between 2024 and 2025. The overall figure was minus 4.9%. Thirty-five companies closed entirely during the period.
The largest group of companies, 348 in total, reported losses in the zero to minus 5% range. A further 191 companies reported losses between -5 and -10%. Even the companies that grew mostly did so within the 0-5% band.
The Nordic countries were the clear exception. As a group, they posted plus 6.5% and account for approximately half of Europe's total EMS revenue by value – a figure driven in part by the acquisitions made by listed Scandinavian EMS groups and their exposure to the defence sector. The Baltic states posted plus 12.5%, benefiting from their role as low-cost production locations for Nordic companies and their notably complete reporting to national registers.
The DACH region – Germany, Austria, and Switzerland – holds the largest share of European EMS revenue at 21.5%, but posted minus 6.9% for 2025. In absolute terms, the combined revenue loss in DACH over 2023 to 2025 amounted to EUR 2.74 billion – more than the total 2024 revenues of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland combined.
The Mediterranean cluster (Spain, Italy, Portugal) appears worse still on the surface, but Haass noted that the figures are heavily distorted by Jabil's closure of its Italian facility, which eliminated 411 jobs and shifted production to a new factory in Croatia. Strip that out, and the group would have posted plus 5.2%.
Headcount: the shift moves west
Job losses in European EMS have changed character. In 2024, when the revenue decline began, the layoffs were concentrated in Central and Eastern Europe – Poland lost around 1,950 jobs, Romania 1,320, Bulgaria 880, Czech Republic 750. Labour flexibility in those markets made them the first adjustment point.
In 2025, that pattern reversed. Of the 5,502 tracked job losses across 963 companies, 66.3% were in Western Europe. Germany and France were most affected. Austria and Hungary also saw significant reductions. Hungary's Prettl Electronics plant closed entirely at the end of 2025. In DACH overall, headcount fell by roughly 3,900 in 2025.
Haass noted that extrapolating from the tracked sample to the full European EMS population could put the 2025 job loss figure close to 11,000.
Size, consolidation, and what growth actually means
Weiss was direct about the structural problem. European EMS growth over the past five years has been largely inorganic. The 72% revenue growth posted by European companies on the global top-100 list between 2020 and 2025, in the majority, reflects acquisitions, not organic expansion. At least 5.3% of the growth expected to be reported for 2026 is already accounted for by acquisitions announced in 2025 whose closings fell into January 2026 and will only appear in next year's numbers.
"We have a cake that we are only dividing differently — but we are not baking a bigger cake," Haass said in the German-language portion of the presentation.
Weiss added that even companies with EUR 100–200 million in revenue are, in the context of the global industry, too small. There is still room for small operators serving niche customers in the EUR 5–20 million range – but the gap between European scale and the scale required to compete for the industries driving global growth is significant and widening.
The speed differential, Weiss argued, is not purely structural. China and Taiwan are moving quickly on humanoid robotics and AI hardware. "We are talking, talking, talking. We are not doing," he said. "China has the speed, and we have a lot of systems."
