Microart bolsters capital equipment investment

CEO Mark Wood, in an email to Evertiq, said that the company has spent USD 250,000 “in the last two weeks,” adding that he spent CDN 1 million in 2018. The 2019 purchases include two additional high-speed pick-and-place machines, one flexible pick-and-place, two screen printers, a 3D X-ray, an X-ray component counter, and a factory floor smart cart for SMT component storage, according to a recent media report. In that same report, Wood said, “We will close our year end on March 31 with another year of almost 20% in top line growth. To maintain this continued growth, we need to make investments into newer, faster and smarter equipment. With the new pick and place machines, we will now have nine SMT lines at our disposal. This will allow us to support not only our current customers increased business, but also many of the new customers that we are currently negotiating with to return production to North America from their current Asian contract manufacturers." To Evertiq, Wood elaborated on the customers who might be returning: “We have many new customers who are shipping into the U.S. and are now using Canada to build their products to escape the tariffs imposed on China-manufactured products. Some are even consumer electronics which we never thought would return to North America. Once you include tariffs and the increased labor rates and increasing shipping rates, Canada has become very competitive.”