[crote]

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.

[monegator]

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.

[abielefeld]

Yes, it's all about fast turnaround without pain.

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.

[PinguTS]

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.

[crote]

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!

[abielefeld]

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.

[m4rtink]

>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.

For those who come after. ;-)

[PinguTS]

I can't share the name. I don't know their prices. I know that they are in Eastern Europe.

From my knowledge, the last time (2022ish) we talked about that was, that they don't take new customers for now. They are working at capacity.

[fock]

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.

[gmueckl]

I can second that there are relatively small electronics manufacturers in Germany. I know a few myself, although I'm not working in that field.

[Slartie]

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.

[abielefeld]

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.