news briefing According to a report by TheElec, a Korean medium, Daeduck Electronics, the South Korean PCB manufacturer, has already liquidated its plant in the Philippines, which has mainly produced low-end automotive boards. Due to low gross profit, Daeduck has stopped its operations and transferred to high-value products such as FC-BGA for development. impact analysis The transformation plan of Daeduck Electronics began in October 2020, while the company had also announced that it would stop developing HDI business but would retain related equipment for semi-additive process (mSAP). As for the original HDI factory, it will be transformed into an FC-BGA factory, focusing on SSDs, and the product is planned for activation in the second half of 2021. In recent years, South Korean PCB manufacturers have chosen to carry out strategic transformations such as those of Japan, because they have lost their competitive edge to Taiwan and Chinese PCB manufacturers in traditional hardboard and HDI, and South Korea has gradually withdrawn from HDI business. Starting in 2019, Samsung Electro-Mechanics (SEMCO) and LG Innotek were the first to withdraw from HDI, and then Daeduck Electronics announced to follow suit in 2020, while ISU Petasys had also declared to withdraw from HDI in 2021. Nonetheless, South Korea and Japan have conducted themselves slightly differently in terms of transformation strategies. South Korea has focused more on the development of substrate and strengthened their connection with the Korean semiconductor industry. Actually, most of the PCB manufacturers are involved with substrate business, and they include Samsung Electro-Mechanics, LG Innotek, Daedeok Electronics, Simmtech, and KCC (Korea Circuit Company), etc. All in all, the substrate business already accounted for over 60% of the overall output value of the PCB industry in South Korea, and its substrate product applications are mainly found with DRAM and SSD, as South Korea is the leading memory chip manufacturer in the world.