Pamela J. Gordon and Fanny Lee, TFI, investigate the electronics industry’s role in the Foxconn suicide problem, and offer advice for OEMs considering implementing or changing their multi-national outsourcing strategy. Can electronics be manufactured at an effective cost and worker-satisfaction rate? Ultimately, it depends on both the customer and the manufacturer.
Steve Glass, RMD Instruments, warns that counterfeit electronic components discovered by the defense industry has doubled since 2008. He busts a few myths about counterfeiting, such as “all counterfeit components come from China” and “counterfeits are so crude they can easily be detected.”
In this article, Paul Bodmer, Bruce Tostevin, and Scott Mazur, Benchmark Electronics Inc., detail the methods used to prevent and detect counterfeit components for various industries such as telecommunications, military, and aerospace. The ultimate goal is preventing counterfeit components and material from propagating into the manufacturing process.
Apple Inc. has become the world’s most valuable technology company based on sales of high-margin hardware like the iPhone, an approach that competitors are finding difficult to duplicate, according to iSuppli Corp.
Counterfeit parts have become highly prevalent in the electronic component industry within the last five years. According to National Electronic Distributors Association (NEDA), counterfeit parts now comprise between 5% and 25% of all available parts and cost the industry as much as $100 billion per year. Kenneth Bradley, Allied Electronics, discusses why devices are counterfeited and what distributors can do to shut them out.
This issue of the Henderson Forecast summary explores the rising costs of healthcare and the medical electronics market. Medical electronics growth slowed during the recession but is surging back, thanks to improved device design, expanded healthcare coverage in the U.S., and other factors.
TFI and DCA collaborated for a design-for-environment roadmap service; Assent announced a SVHC declaration tool for managing REACH compliance; and SYSPRO added an inventory optimization module to its management suite.
In this video, Paul Romano, Fusion, discusses counterfeit electronics detection and prevention. X-ray images and decapsulated components illustrate his points.
These new products include machine controllers, ERP software, a barcode scanner, laser marker, ESD control, MES, and other line-control products.
Organic growth versus mergers/acquistions? Lead times improving? How are the end markets? EMS providers Flextronics, Celestica, Jabil, and other electronics supply chain companies shared outlooks at the 7th annual Credit Suisse Electronics Supply Chain Conference. Read the main points summarized by Credit Suisse analysts William Stein, CFA, and Rahul Chadha.
Among the most successful vendors were those that controlled an integrated set of operating system (OS), hardware and services. Smartphone sales to end users saw their strongest year-on-year increase since 2006. RIM, a pure smartphone player, made its debut in the top five mobile devices manufacturers. Apple increased its market share by 1.2 percentage points. Android’s momentum continued into the first quarter of 2010, particularly in North America, where sales of Android-based phones increased 707% YoY.
Bob Wolff, On-Site Gas, opens up the N-20 nitrogen generation system, explaining how the system makes nitrogen from the ambient air, for use in electronics assembly processes. This video is from IPC APEX 2010 in Las Vegas.
In spite of general negative sentiment among many vendors in this space, IMS Research predicts strong growth for most automation equipment in 2010 and 2011. Q01 2010 growth will likely have been 25% over that of Q01 2009.
The main challenge for small and midsized manufacturers in the year ahead will be to manage the increase in demand with capacity, monitoring how much of the uptick is due to inventory replenishment verses customer driven demand, and matching that with throughput and hiring decisions. This report comes from buying consortium Prime Advantage.
This market overview from ChemSec -- the International Chemical Secretariat shows that legislative and industry initiatives for less hazardous electronics are bringing about technically and economically feasible replacements for brominated flame retardants (BFR) and PVC in a wide range of electronic products. Numerous electronic products without brominated flame retardants and PVC are already on the market, with more on company’s planning timelines.
Credit Suisse analysts William Stein, CFA and Rahul Chadha provide key take-aways on electronics manufacturing services’ supply chain from the annual Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC).
Apple, by all accounts, is a very successful high-tech company. The most recent success of the iPad demonstrates Apple’s unique position in the market as a device OEM and content aggregator, which allows it unprecedented interaction and interface to the customer for the device and the content and applications. In the process of developing a complete solution, Apple controls just about every step in the value chain. Jim McGregor provides this analysis on Apple for In-Stat.
We need to go beyond visual inspection to track down counterfeit components. Hemant C. Warad, Sakda Sangthamma, Anusorn Sawetwong, and Martin Huehne, Celestica, describe two examples of counterfeit ICs received from a broker. The counterfeits were intercepted by a counterfeit detection procedure routinely applied to every purchase of electronic parts from a broker. The successful detection of the counterfeiting was based on optical inspection of the package, X-ray imaging, C-SAM, and optical inspection of the die after decapsulation.
The Top 10 contract manufacturers of cell phones will experience a difficult 2010 following a year that upended their longstanding business models and dealt them unprecedented losses, according to iSuppli Corp.
The merger of WPG Holdings Limited and Yosun Industrial Corp., both based in Taiwan, could create the world’s largest electronics distributor, according to iSuppli Corp., challenging Avnet and Arrow for the top electronics component distributor spot.
