Funfact: If you are working in the industry, you know that there are many companies who produce electronics in Europe in general and some even in Germany.
The problem is the gap between hobbyist project and hundred-thousand-unit production run.
You can't easily and cheaply get 10, 100, or 1000 units manufactured in the EU the way you can in China. This pretty much kills hardware startups and scaleups wanting to do local manufacturing.
If you're not a multinational or have an essentially-unlimited budget for your small-scale run, you have to outsource it to China.
Disagree. The main reason we use chinese fabs is because we can actually get the goods in less than three weeks, so if we have a surge in sales we are covered pretty quickly.
The other reason is that we do some low complexity boards all specified with chinese parts, JLCPCB for the win, and our contractor agrees with us. They are not interested in those jobs because they can't possibly compete.
However, for our batch size/complexity our local contractor beats the chinese, by a good margin, and they keep growing the business. In Italy. The only problem we have with them is lead time, because there is always some hiccup, some missing part, some email that gets answered a day too late. I've been asking them for years to just provide their catalog with their partnumbers so i can just specify them in the BOM, and we won't waste all that time back and forth, but it's never been a true priority, but they do need to streamline the process. All european manufacturers need to streamline their process.
Another comment here lamented that the issue is that the fabs may try to treat every board as unique, whereas is should be us designers that adapt to them. I agree. That's a general issue in our attitude to designing a product, in many areas.
Manufacturers in china just do it fast, and avoid all the pains, they actually care about customer experience above all, something we have to learn from ourselves obviously!
As I said in another comment, I fully expect things to change for the better: Some manufacturers will go out of business, but yet others will turn around in time.
All these people that were laid off will find jobs again, revitalizing moribund companies. Some will create their own companies, I view myself as part of this group.
I work with companies, which have a more like small scale production. They are about 100 or so workers. Yes, this is also possible. They grew their business in the last 25 years, when it was even harder to produce something than these days. At least one of these business have PCB suppliers in the EU, which helped them in the post COVID crises where everybody struggled with supply.
I just named some big name brands. I also know mid-size and smaller brands.
Building your business and getting your stuff together is hard for any startup in any business field.
Could you perhaps share those PCBA businesses with us?
I tried quite hard to find them when I was still in the hardware world, and I never managed to find anything even remotely close to what China offers at less than 10x the price.
I'd love to give it another shot for some hobby projects if the industry has indeed changed in the last few years!
I think the original commenter means companies that manufacture their own products but do not offer manufacturing services.
You can't beat JLC because the model from JLC is that they lose money on all order less than 100 boards, so that they win order of 10 to 100k+
If you work in germany in engineering, you know a lot of mittelstand (SMEs) actually have some production machinery, as said, usually they have between 50 and 200 employees, and they manufacture pretty niche products up to 10k units a year or so.
They do not advertise this, as their business model is not manufacturing, it's selling their own products.
I am actually the speaker of the talk, and for us, manufacturing is not a business model either, it's just the capability we want to develop. Our business model would be to sell products. We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.
>We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.
probably the likes of Enics and GPV - nowadays this is likely a field overrun by military demand and private equity squeezing the supply side... Also I doubt that they can/want to compete with jlcpcb et al.
I can third this observation. I've even had my flat above one of these for 10 years. Small company, privately-owned, five employees or so. They have a few pick-and-place machines (SIMATICs as far as I have seen) located in a small factory building and manufacture small production runs with them.
They don't have a real website advertising their services, but they seem to do well, probably their customers know them. They've run their business continuously for at least those 10 years I've lived at that spot. I could smell the soldering oven running constantly.
For an example with a website, see Waterott, it's run by one person who has a single Siplace SMT machine and stencils manually, and he has no issues earning money.
As far as I am aware the European plants survive mostly on decent QA and regulated industries. When the cost of a defect slipping QA is high, it can be cheaper to operate European plant with intra-step quality controls than manufacture in China and slap thorough QA on top.
I feel like HN posters simply know the names of these companies because they're big, but don't actually work at those companies, otherwise they would know about the massive waves of layoffs and offshoring happening there lately.
I feel like some HN posters simply read news and don't work in the industry and have actual insights on what's happening.
Like Hydac moved some of there assembly from China to Germany.
A company in the district nearby, just moved their whole production from Thailand back to here. Yes, production costs are higher. But there is not transportation costs. They don't have long lead times anymore and can react more better to demand. So the overall costs assessment lead to the decision it is better to have production here locally.
I recommend to go to SPS, Agritechnica, and so and talk to actual people.
BTW: Even as Continental has layoff. There are other companies around that happily absorb those people. Because 2 years back, that had problems employing people.
If possible I would like to know what positions and how much they were offering.
I had offerings for a manager position, 15 people, responsibility for the 15, including in house training of them, and part responsibility in the 5 different projects these people were working on. They wanted somebody with background in HW development, 10 years experience in FPGA, experience of at least 5 years Linux driver development, cryptography, at least 5 years managing people.
Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience.
That's the dirty secret of "the employment shortage".
Under pay, no one takes the job, so justify off-shoring.
The truth, having talked to employees at big firms, is that in the past, entire factories were off shored to save 10 cents from one single part in a product.
Today, most jobs are not just under-paid, they are undignified. Because any job can be gratifying in the right circumstances, even a job on a factory line, it just has to:
1. Pay a fair wage
2. Be designed to be gratifying
Companies dont even care about their customers anymore, we all know it's been more than 15 years since they've cared about their employees. That's how entshittification goes.
>Under pay, no one takes the job, so justify off-shoring.
You mean to justify easy rubber stamping work visas on candidates from abroad.
Offshoring is usually last resort when costs other than labor are also much cheaper abroad like energy, or there's other incentives like government handouts or tax exemptions that high-CoL EU countries like France or Germany can't compete with.
>Companies dont even care about their customers anymore, we all know it's been more than 15 years since they've cared about their employees. That's how entshittification goes.
Exactly. And sometimes even very strange things happen. Currently I know of a company taking lots of positions from Germany to China, people in China are having more money in the pocket per year. The cost to the company are basically the same, but people is more motivated. Mind you, that people are not working crazy hs! Mostly 8 to 9 hs per day 5 days a week.
>Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience.
In which country?
The sad thing is the state of supply and demand in the economy, doesn't really care how many years of experience you have, or how hard you worked, or how difficult the job is. It'll pay as little as they can get away with.
Sucks, but welcome to being a tax cattle in Europe, where someone on the dole with welfare and credits takes home nearly as much as you do. Thank our politicians for outsourcing everything that wasn't nailed to the ground for 20+ years in the name of shareholder growth.
South Germany. In a capital city. And that was “tops”
And as you say, 40% is out of the bat off. Then you have expensive energy also plagued with taxes… plus of course 19% VAT, etc, etc, etc… if somebody in USA could tell me what would you earn for that there would be nice.
If you're open to being mobile right now you might consider relocating to work in the EE industry of Linz, Villach or Graz in Austria or the aerospace/defence industry Toulouse in France.
Someone with your experience wouldn't earn much less there and you'd have much lower housing CoL than the big capital cities in southern Germany, and better food and weather.
I’m sure there is one or another company generating employment. I didn’t stated something different. Did I?
I just named a fact. I know people in at least 3 different companies in the list that lost their job last year, and many others which are in the list until 2030. The people that lost their jobs are/were more than 1 year searching. I’m talking with many “actual people” in different industries, and it is not looking very bright…
Most of the open positions is management of projects in other parts of the world. I see almost no development in SW or electronics going on here, much less production.
Who is "that" in this context? Can you be more specific.
>Even as Continental has layoff
Not just Conti, but all major automotive suppliers, semiconductor, embedded companies spread across Europe had mass layoffs.
And not everyone was quickly absorbed. I have EE friends almost a year unemployed after the layoffs. They apply but only get rejections, not sure why. It's a bloodbath right now in industries in high-CoL regions.
And is not only automotive. Other sectors are also suffering a lot. As you said, finding a new job is not very easy, even if you are ok with 1hs commute. As far as I know, all big companies are moving work outside the EU in a hurry.
Bosch, Continental, Siemens, Palfinger, FAUN, Webasto, Phoenix Contact, Beckhoff, …