Electronics Production |
Finding opportunity after Flextronics
In the midst of the employment gloom in Skive, Denmark, following the closure of Flextronics’ local plant, there’s the odd silver lining. Take for instance, X-Flex.
“The day after my employment stopped at Flextronics my new company X-Flex started business,” says Morten Veis Thomsen, founder of the appropriately named company.
Before Flextronics left Skive, Veis Thomsen worked as a project manager for the company’s transfer team.
Now he’s busy running a company that offers rework and repair services to manufactures of electronics in Asia. X-Flex’s first customer is Flextronics Malaysia.
“The company has three employees beside myself,” says Veis Thomsen. Like Veis Thomsen, they’re all ex Flextronics employees.
He says Flextronics has helped the company in its earliest stages.
“Both Flextronics Skive and Flextronics Malaysia have cooperated very well with me. Currently I’m renting part of the Flextronics Skive facility from Flextronics and also all my equipment has been purchased from Flextronics,” Veis Thomsen explains.
Staying in Skive has offered a few advantages. For one, with Flextronics leaving, there’s no shortage of experience staff available.
“The reason why we are doing it in Skive is that we have a lot of experienced people on doing rework and repair, but also that Flextronics Malaysia’s big client Bang and Olufsen is located just 30km from here. So we have a good position geographically to support their deliveries to Bang and Olufsen”.
Although Flextronics Malaysia is currently X-Flex’s only customer, Veis Thomsen says he sees opportunities to expand.
“My hope is that I can establish myself as a rework and repair house for far east EMS companies that do business with Northern European companies - so that we can be the safety net for Asia companies,” he says. “For instance if they have a serial error on a complete batch then we will be able to very quickly contain this serial error and return good products to the end customers”.
He also is looking into chances to help local manufacturers.
“We are working on setting up similar set-ups with other Flextronics sites because we’ve always been approved as a sub-contractor for Flextronics. But also working with all the local companies to do market repairs, for instance a local manufacturer who had products produced in Asia”.
