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Electronics Production |

Eurocircuits biggest investment to date

One thing has always been clear for PCB manufacturer Eurocircuits – continues investments have been the key for the company’s success, and investments have been made.

The company has, throughout the years, made investments in all areas of the company, from new factories (here’s an example from when the company constructed its second manufacturing facility in Hungary which today houses the assembly unit), test and manufacturing equipment, software development and all the way to customer support and in people. This year however, Eurocircuits has made its biggest investment to date; EUR 5 million. An investment that is meant to assist the company to meet the demands coming from its customers, the company discloses in an update. But it’s not ‘just’ made to meet the demand of the company’s services, it’s also been made to sharpen them – reducing the delivery time. “For example, this year we reduced our standard delivery from 7 to 3 working days for our PCB Proto service to meet customer demands. We also introduced our 3+3 service, offering Prototype PCBs Manufactured in 3 days and Assembled in 3 days,” the company writes in the update. Out of the EUR 5 million investment, a major part was earmarked to improve and expand the company’s assembly service. But investments were also made in the PCB production and software development. Assembly services is still in many ways very new for Eurocircuits, the company introduced the service about two years ago as a Prototype & Small Series service in direct response to customer and market demands. Since then, the demand for the company’s assembly services has skyrocketed and already in 2018 it became very clear that a larger investment would be required soon in order to meet the increasing demand of the service. Just to put this in perspective, and remember, this is a fairly new service, in 2019 (January to October) the company’s assembly service had handled more than 3’500 orders from more than 1’100 customers. Now, let’s put this in contrast to the 1’700 orders from 670 customers to the entire year of 2018. Evertiq reached out to Dirk Stans, managing partner of Eurocircuits, to get some insights on exactly what the investment provided the company with, and the shopping list is a long one – just listen to this. The Belgian operation got an upgrade in Integr8tor licenses. The site went from having 20 to 40 in total. As a side note, the addition makes Eurocircuits’ Belgian site the largest Integr8tor site UCAMCO has amongst its customers worldwide. The company’s German PCB production got a new etching line from ITC/WISE and two new routing machines from Lenz. The Hungarian PCB manufacturing unit got a new A7 flying probe tester from ATG, a new Direct Imaging Ledia from UCAMCO and 3 Schmoll routing machines. As you can see, Christmas came early for the company. However, the biggest chunk of the investment went to the company’s newest venture; the assembly service unit. The Hungarian assembly unit received four Mycronic MY300 pick & place machines, two MY700 solder paste jetters, six SMD automatic stocking towers and some 2’500 feeders. But we’re not done just yet. Adding to this the unit also got two ERSA 3/20 Hotflow reflow ovens, a Europlacer SP710 screen printer and a XTV160-XRAY machine from Nikon and then we top it all off with an SPI unit from Koh Young. With an investment in assembly such as this one, it is difficult to continue to call Eurocircuits ‘just’ a PCB manufacturer, the company is moving more and more towards becoming a full-fledged “electronics supplier”. “Our assembly is very well placed in Hungary as the country is after Germany the biggest electronics manufacturing area in Europe. This assures us support from our suppliers on all technologies we use and that on very short notice which is exactly what we need for our service of Fast Turnaround Prototypes & Small Series,” Dirk states. With an investment of this size, resulting in this much new equipment, one might also think that this will add some manpower, something that Dirk confirmed to Evertiq. “Yes of course this will boost up our number of people at the Hungarian site as we will quadruple our capacity for assembling PCB Prototypes & Small Series.” He goes on to explain that the Eurocircuits Group today has well over 400 employees out of which close to 200 are based in Hungary. “Normally we invest on a yearly basis between EUR 2 million and EUR 3 million, but EUR 5 million is our biggest party yet,” Dirk says while specifying that this is not just an investment in machines but rather; “an investment in a new service and a brighter future.”

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March 28 2024 10:16 am V22.4.20-2
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