1. Industry competition pattern

(1) International market competition pattern

The global PCB production is mainly concentrated in four regions, namely Chinese Mainland, Japan, Taiwan, China, and South Korea, while the United States and Europe retain the production of some high-end products. From the perspective of industrial technology level, Japan is the world's largest high-end PCB production region, with products mainly consisting of high-end HDI boards, packaging substrates, and high-rise flexible boards. The product technology level is constantly developing towards high difficulty. The United States has retained the research and development and production of highly complex PCBs, with products mainly made of high-end multilayer boards, mainly used in military, aviation, communication applications, and other fields. The United States remains the world's largest producer of multilayer boards with 18 or more layers.

The production technology of high-end products in South Korea and Taiwan, China has also made great breakthroughs, and the product structure has gradually developed to the field of high-tech and high value-added products. HDI boards and packaging substrates account for a high proportion of the products produced. At present, South Korea, Taiwan, China and Japan have mastered the production of most of the world's packaging substrates.

Relatively speaking, there is still a certain gap between the overall technical level of products in Chinese Mainland and that in the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, China. However, in recent years, with the rapid expansion of the industrial scale, the upgrading process of Chinese Mainland's PCB industry has also been accelerated, and the production capacity of high-end multilayer boards, flexible boards, HDI boards and other products has been greatly improved.

(2) Domestic market competition pattern

The huge development space of China's PCB market has attracted a large number of international enterprises to enter, and the vast majority of world-renowned PCB production enterprises have established production bases in China and are actively expanding. At present, the PCB market in China has formed a pattern of joint competition among Taiwanese, Hong Kong, American, Japanese, Korean, and domestic enterprises. Among them, foreign-funded enterprises generally have a large investment scale, and have certain advantages in production technology and product specialization; There are many domestic enterprises, but there is still a certain gap in scale and level compared to foreign enterprises.

The development level of domestic enterprises in China is still relatively insufficient, which is not in line with the development status of the PCB industry in China. For a considerable period of time in the future, China will still be an important destination for global PCB industry investment. Therefore, Chinese enterprises must broaden their financing channels, continuously improve their technological level, optimize their product structure, enhance their comprehensive strength and market share through large-scale development, in order to cope with domestic and foreign market competition. In order to increase financing channels for enterprises, improve their development level and competitiveness, more and more enterprises engaged in PCB production and related industries in China have gone public.

2. The main obstacles to entering this industry

The PCB industry is a comprehensive industry that is capital intensive, technology intensive, labor-intensive, and has high difficulty in business management. It has various barriers including technology, capital, product certification and customer recognition, talent, environmental compliance, and so on.

(1) Technical barriers

PCB is a multidisciplinary and composite high-tech industry with high technical difficulty. First of all, PCB manufacturing integrates many disciplines, such as electronics, machinery, computer, optics, materials, and chemical engineering. It is highly integrated in technology and difficult to develop. It requires long-term accumulation and transformation of theoretical knowledge into actual production capacity to ensure the stability and continuity of product production. Secondly, PCB products have a wide variety and application fields, with new processes and materials emerging endlessly. Different downstream industries and customers have different requirements for the variety types, technical performance, material properties, and other aspects of PCB products.

Therefore, PCB production enterprises must possess strong technical level and research and development capabilities in order to timely develop and produce products that meet customer needs, and adapt to the constantly innovative and changing development trend of electronic products. Once again, the manufacturing process of PCB products has numerous and complex processes, and the requirements for setting parameters in each process are very strict. The requirements for product precision are also high. Enterprises must have a good theoretical level, long-term experience accumulation, and advanced production processes in order to manufacture high-performance and high-precision products.

(2) Financial barriers

PCB has a capital intensive characteristic, forming a high financial barrier. On the one hand, producing PCB products requires a variety of professional production equipment and related testing equipment, which is expensive and requires high funding. Manufacturers must make significant initial investments to achieve enterprise operations. On the other hand, there are a wide variety of PCB products, and different customers have different requirements for the products. For different PCB products, production enterprises often need to choose and use different production equipment based on product structure, substrate material, product performance characteristics, and various special requirements specified by customers, and combined with the company's own process characteristics. This phenomenon further increases the capital investment of enterprises.

(3) Product certification and customer recognition barriers

PCB is a key component in the manufacturing of electronic products, so it requires multiple standard certifications to obtain customer recognition. Firstly, PCB products must pass necessary industry standard certifications in terms of quality and environmental protection, such as ISO9001 standard quality certification and ISO14001 standard environmental protection certification. Secondly, PCB products in different application fields must pass the relevant certification of downstream products in order to be applied to downstream products. For example, PCB products for automotive electronics need to pass the ISO/TS16949 certification related to automotive products, and PCB products used in the medical field need to pass the ISO13485 certification related to medical products.

PCB companies must have high capabilities in production technology, production conditions, enterprise management, product testing, and quality control in order to pass various standard certifications and gain customer recognition, in order to establish and develop in the market.

(4) Technical talent barriers

The PCB industry is a comprehensive high-tech industry, and production enterprises not only need to have the ability to conduct in-depth research and innovative development of PCB product structure and manufacturing process, but also need to have the ability to provide constructive product solutions to downstream complete machine enterprises to help them improve the wiring structure of related products and improve product reliability.

This requires enterprises to have a large number of high-quality comprehensive technical talents. The cultivation of comprehensive professional talents requires a large amount of knowledge system training and long-term industry experience accumulation. The cultivation of excellent PCB talents takes a long time, which forms a high technical talent resource barrier for newly entered enterprises.

(5) Environmental compliance barriers

With the increasing awareness of environmental protection among people, countries around the world are paying more and more attention to environmental protection. Many countries have enacted environmental regulations on the production and scrapping of electronic products. For example, the European Union has established regulations such as the "Directive on Restricting the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electronic and Electrical Equipment" (ROHS), the "Directive on Scrap Electronic and Electrical Equipment" (WEEE), the "Registration, Evaluation, Licensing and Restriction of Chemicals" (REACH), and the "Directive on Restricting the Sale and Use of Perfluorooctane Sulfonic Acid". The Chinese government has also issued policies and regulations such as the "Management Measures for Pollution Prevention and Control of Electronic Information Products" and the "Clean Production Standards for Printed Circuit Manufacturing Industry". In 2009, the China Printed Circuit Industry Association also completed the national standard approval draft for the "Electronic Industry Pollutant Emission Standard - Electronic Components and Printed Circuit Boards", which formed a more effective control and guidance effect on pollutant emissions in the PCB industry.