To grow revenue in a very competitive industry, many electronics manufacturing services providers are expanding to new countries or shifting their geographic footprint by opening new facilitities around the globe.
“China is always the epicenter, but there has been some shifting out of China,” says Adam Pick, principal analyst EMS/ODM, with researcher iSuppli in El Segundo, Calif. “There are capacity expansions by a number of providers in Vietnam and Malaysia by big guys like Flextronics and smaller guys like Plexus.”
He says in some cases Eastern Europe is being viewed as an alternative to Asia.
“We found that a number of industrial guys caught a bug and said ‘let’s go to Asia with our outsourcing. Now they are now saying ‘why did we do that.’ When you get to cultural differences, program management issues, time needed to travel back and forth with engineering teams, people have questioned whether it is worth it,” he says.
