Panasonic consolidates SMT support and training in Budapest
Panasonic Factory Solutions has opened a significantly expanded Technical Centre in Budapest, centralising customer support, engineering, service and development activities for Central and Eastern Europe. The facility replaces the company's previous training site in Munich.
The move follows growing demand for training, demonstrations and lifecycle support as electronics manufacturers continue to expand production capacity across the region, according to a press release from Panasonic. The Munich facility had reached its capacity limits, although the company's Customer Experience Centre in Munich will remain as its B2B showcase.
"As demand for our training programmes, demonstrations and engineering support continued to grow, it became clear that our previous Technical Centre no longer provided the space our customers and teams required," says Jérôme Clouet, Senior Product Manager at Panasonic Connect Europe.
The Budapest centre features an 860 square metre shop floor with a significantly larger demonstration line, four training and demonstration rooms, and a dedicated materials warehouse and sample room for customer-specific configurations. The line is equipped with placement machines from the NPM G Series, ASF feeders with automated material refilling and the APC-5M software, which uses AI for predictive maintenance. The site also leaves room for additional floor automation in the future.
Budapest will also serve as a hub for Panasonic's operations, maintenance and lifecycle support programmes. The company established a head and feeder refurbishment service in the city in 2022, and plans to offer proactive and predictive maintenance services going forward.
Panasonic cites two reasons for choosing Budapest: its location in one of Europe's fastest-growing electronics manufacturing regions, close to industrial clusters in the Czech Republic and Romania, and access to engineering talent from the country's universities and research institutions.
"Central and Eastern Europe is one of the most dynamic regions for electronics manufacturing, particularly within the automotive and industrial sectors, and AI server board production," says Jérôme Clouet.
