News Briefing
In recent years, under the global deployment boom and geopolitical factors, Taiwanese PCB manufacturers also have investment plans in Southeast Asia. Recently, the TPCA and the TEEMA expected to form a visit group to Thailand in early November; it is understood that there are nearly 40 enterprises responded, and two-thirds of them were from PCB industry.

Impact Analysis
Under the influence of the US-China technology conflict and China's strict dynamic zero policy in recent years, the global supply chain is moving outward from China. Comparing the list of global suppliers announced by Apple in 2019 and 2022, if calculated based on the number of production or R&D sites, the proportion of origin in mainland China (including Hong Kong) will drop from 46.1% in 2019 to 35.4% in 2022. The proportion of production in Southeast Asia increased from 11.7% to 15.8%, which is the region with the largest increase. Among them, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, India and Vietnam are the countries where the number of manufacturers in Apple's supply chain has grown more.

From the perspective of the distribution of global PCB production areas, mainland China is still the largest production area, accounting for 56.3% of the PCB production capacity. Southeast Asia currently only accounts for about 10%, of which Vietnam and Thailand are popular PCB industry investment hotspots, and a considerable-scale PCB industry settlement has been formed. Japanese and Korean PCB manufacturers are the most active in investing in Southeast Asia, and their products include rigid boards, flexible boards and substrate. In the past, Taiwan's PCB industry was not much distributed in Southeast Asia, and its products were mainly traditional hard boards for computer, consumer and automotive applications. However, since this year, more and more factories have begun to focus on this, and they have announced investment plans. Manufacturers include PCB manufacuturers such as APEX, CHINPOON, gbm, as well as material suppliers such as Taiflex and EMC.