This year, the printed circuit board (PCB) industry finally got rid of the previous three consecutive years of low growth! According to the seminar jointly held by Taiwan Circuit Association and Industrial Research Institute in the middle of the first quarter, this year the two major consumer markets in Europe and the United States have reopened the door to consumption and procurement, effectively boosting the market's demand for electronic products. Of course, PCB, one of the core components, benefits directly.

The Industrial Research Institute also estimated that the output value of PCB industry of Taiwan businessmen on both sides of the Taiwan Straits would grow by 2.66% in 2014, and the scale of converted output value would be NT $533 billion, breaking the low growth trend that has only maintained about 1% in the past three years. Corresponding to the PCB group in China, the softboard industry still maintains a strong growth momentum with the support of Apple's orders, including F-Zending, Jialianyi and Yijia, which switched to softboard from key press transformation. As for the HDI board, Xinxing, which has been "bad" for a long time, deals with Apple again, and the performance is expected to rise at the bottom. The share price of Jingshuo, which carries IC boards, continues to rise. Nandian, which has a low base period, has a turnaround in performance, Or there may be a chance to play the big black horse.

HDI supply and demand become tight

According to the PCB industry, there has been a wave of great adjustment in the PCB industry in the past few years, especially the PC related industries have been hit hard, and the soft board group that seize the opportunity to rise is seizing the new trend of the industry. This year, the entire PCB industry has the opportunity to say goodbye to the low tide! The investment trust legal person said that from the perspective of cost alone, it has great advantages. For example, the main raw materials of PCB include copper foil, glass fiber cloth and resin, among which copper foil accounts for about 15% of the production cost; In addition, the carrier plate and some PCB products adopt the way of gold salt electroplating, and gold also accounts for a certain proportion of the cost. However, this year the gold price and copper price maintain a weak pattern, which is conducive to easing the cost pressure. From the application side, the launch of Apple's iPhone, iWatch and other new products will be a heavyweight benefit for the entire PCB industry. First, the demand for HDI and soft boards will increase significantly in the large size iPhone, especially in the HDI board, where there may even be a gap between supply and demand. From the demand side, with the growing function of smart phones, In the past, the middle and low level smart phones used only three layers of ANY LAYER boards, but now they also use ten layers of boards compared with the high level models. The demand for HDI has increased significantly. From the supply side, Japanese manufacturers have successively closed HDI production lines, while Korean HDI suppliers also had a fire in March. With the limited output of HDI's new capacity, the market expects that there will be a bottleneck in supply and demand, In order to ensure smooth delivery of HDI production capacity, Apple and non Apple camps have recently started to carry out pile fixing operations. Among them, Xinxing, which has the largest HDI capacity, is regarded as an important target for all businesses. For example, it is rumored that Xinxing is in intensive contact with Apple in the market, and is likely to return to the HDI supply chain of iPhone. In addition, Huatong's new capacity in Chongqing will also be opened in the second half of the year. The French estimate that even if Apple's orders are not increased, the orders of mainland customers of low - and mid-level smart phones alone will be enough to absorb most of the capacity. Therefore, The legal person is quite optimistic about the performance growth of HDI ethnic group this year.

New demand for IC carrier

Another killer product of Apple is the wearable device iWatch. Because the wearable device must be thin and small, SiP substrates will be widely used. It is expected that Jingshuo and Nandian will be the main suppliers of the two IC carriers.