News Briefing （2020/09/22）
     Due to the ban on Huawei technology, orders for their products have dropped sharply, and Mutual-Tek has decided to relocate all of its production capacity to Changshu once current orders from plants in Taiwan have been fulfilled. This will entail taking into account production costs as well as the regional attributes of end customers. Construction of the proposed Taishan plant has also recently been terminated.

Impact Analysis 
    The ban on Huawei products (effective as of 15 September) will be a hard knock for the mobile phone company. The original estimate of a shipment of approximately 220 million pieces in 2020 has been revised downwards by almost a quarter (24%) to approximately 168 million pieces. Mutual-Tek, (Huawei’s primary application specialist) has also been greatly affected. According to released statistics, the consolidated revenue of Mutual-Tek in 2019 was NT$4.45 billion, accounting  for roughly 0.6% of Taiwan’s total output value of NT$662.4 billion. As Taiwanese plants stopped production in 2020, revenue has accounted for approximately 50% of the total, and the output value from the Taiwanese market should, in reality, be less than 0.3%. Mutual-Tek had originally scheduled to invest NT$3.3 billion in Taiwan for building a new plant at Taishan, but the plan has currently been terminated as a whole, and the land has been redesignated for sale. This indicates that Mutual-Tek will completely adopt mainland China as its production base in the future. 

    To cope with the US ban, Huawei is actively pursuing de-Americanization of its supply chain, while increasing purchases from Taiwan. As such, Taiwanese manufacturers for Huawei are increasingly numerous, and currently include TSMC (the foundry leader), MediaTek (IC design), and Largan (optical lenses), to name a few. As a whole, manufacturers play a key role in minimizing the impact from reduced Huawei orders, as they lead the cutting edge of product development. 

In recent years there have been instances of large-scale layoffs among Taiwan's industries due to reductions in orders stemming from single-customer withdrawals. These unfortunate incidents demonstrate that if manufacturers rely too heavily on only one, or too few, customers they reduce their ability to diversify orders, and doom themselves to be exposed to greater risks of operation fluctuations. The key to the sustainable operation of Taiwan's PCB manufacturers in the future therefore lies in the advantage provided by being at the leading edge of high-end technology and customer diversification. Through continued research and development, while building capacity to weather drastic external changes, reaching the next generation’s PCB requirements   while lowering risks to the minimum remains an achievable goal.