Countdown for electronica has begun
By Dieter G. Weiss
The world‘s leading trade fair for electronics in Munich/Germany is less than one month ahead of us. Time to plan your visit, get entrance tickets, scroll thru the list of exhibitors to plan which companies to visit and brief the staff, who will attend the fair, either as visitors or as exhibitors.
If you have not already booked your accommodation several month ago, you will now end up with much prices and might have to accept longer travel times to the fair as nearly all hotels in the city are already booked out.
I did my planning already, focusing on the EMS industry. From the EMS industry, I found 137 EMS companies, which have production in Europe. Counting all of their European factories, one has to add another 85, bringing it to 222 different legal entities from the EMS industry. This equals about 13% of the 1710 EMS companies, the in4ma statistics for the European EMS industry has identified.
Looking at the European TOP 50 EMS, there are several surprises. Even though 60% of them are exhibitors, big global players such as Jabil, Celestica and Benchmark are missing. Do they have enough customers/orders or are they on a cost savings program in order to improve their profit margins? The same question has to be asked for the big European players such as Enics, Eolane and Scanfil.
Looking at the percentages in regards to the total number of EMS companies by country, EMS suppliers from Eastern Europe have the highest representation. 52% of the Hungarian EMS are represented either direct or thru their mother companies. For Lithuania it is 50%, for Slovakia 35%, Romania 23%, the Czech Republic 21% and Bulgaria 15%. Only Poland is lagging behind with 10%. Form the West-European countries, Austria has the highest representation with 29%, followed by Germany with 17% and Italy with 11%. All other countries are represented less than 10%, even big countries like France, UK and Sweden.
In absolute terms, 58 German EMS companies, representing 77 German factories, are the biggest part of registered EMS companies. Looking at it from the other side, 385 German EMS companies are missing.
Interesting discussions are ahead of us and hopefully the exhibiting companies this year tell their staff at the exhibition stands to spread positive news, be a professional expert for the products/services on sale and make a good impression not only to potential customers but also to all visitors thus improving the image of the company. Employees, who are just sitting in a corner all day long, hammering on their laptops or cell phones, should be left home, as they can do this inside the company. The exhibition is too expensive not to use every contact for a positive signal into the market.
www.in4ma.de
