Those familiar with their Sanmina-SCI history might recall the name Milan Mandari?. Mandari? cofounded the firm along with Jure Sola in 1980.
Sola, of course, remains in charge. For his part, Mandari? moved to England, bought a soccer team, and continued to invest in new businesses.
Perhaps he should have stayed in PCBs. Mandari? is currently on trial, charged with making bribes in order to avoid business transaction taxes. (He denies the charges.)
We had a great premiere of PCB Chat yesterday. Eric Bogatin, the signal integrity guru, hosted the nearly two hour session, answering more than 20 questions.
The transcript can be seen here (you must be signed in to Printed Circuit University to view it; registration is free).
The next chat will be Feb. 7 with SMT process consultant Phil Zarrow. Note that you don’t need to make the live session in order to ask a question: questions may be submitted in advance.
If you have recommendations for future moderators, drop me a line or post in the comments. Thanks!
CEO Tim Cook has taken to the Apple airwaves, rebutting claims made by The New York Times and others that company indirectly contributes to worker abuse but not rejecting Foxconn as a supplier.
In a letter, published yesterday by 9to5mac, Cook wrote, “Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners and going deeper into the supply chain. As we reported earlier this month, we’ve made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers. We know of no one in our industry doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people.”
I’ll address the second point first. It’s true Apple has been singled out for bad corporate behavior toward Third World workers, while companies such as Dell and H-P are equally reliant on their supply chains (often the same suppliers), yet receive far less flak. It says here Apple is getting the brunt of bad publicity for good reason. The company has struck a wholly sanctimonious tone toward those who dared criticize its leadership. It has been strident in its support of Foxconn, the biggest (in size and in number of incidents) purveyor of recorded worker abuses. Apple on any given day is the largest (by market capitalization) company in the world. If a critic wants to make a point at a company’s expense, who better than Apple? Frankly, HP and Dell have been so beset by internal management problems, attacking them for supply-chain problems seems somewhat quaint by comparison.
As for the first point (“Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners and going deeper into the supply chain.”), the truth is Apple does not visit every one of its suppliers every year. In 2011, Apple conducted 229 audits, 100 of which were first-time audits. According to the company, 97% of Apple’s procurement expenses are from 156 vendors. Incredibly, by Apple’s own admission, the logic says it audited many of its suppliers for the first time in 2011. (Either that, or the math isn’t working out, unless Apple is churning its supply base — composed primarily of well-known companies in their respective fields — with great rapidity, or that supply base is adding new plants with even greater rapidity, because the number of first-time audits has been at or over 100 three years running.)
I commend Apple for bringing some degree of transparency to the issue. But the numbers don’t quite add up. Nor does the nagging feeling that Apple, which perhaps has no parallel when it comes to leveraging a supply chain for competitive advantage, could effect positive change at places like Foxconn and Pegatron, if only it were willing to shoulder the financial risk.
When you have $100 billion* in the bank, you can afford to stop by each of your suppliers at least once a year. And when you’re the biggest company in the world, and apparently comfortable lecturing anyone else on what they should think, then you’d better be able to handle the blowback. If Cook can’t handle the heat, he should get out of the kitchen.
He wasn’t yesterday, and he might not be tomorrow, but for today, Tim Main is my hero.
The Jabil chief today became the first major electronics executive to publicly rebuke Foxconn, the world’s largest EMS company. At its annual shareholders meeting, Main asserted that Foxconn has “some very abusive policies, employment policies. And I think their business will begin to suffer because of the way they treated their employees.”
OK, so it doesn’t rise to the level of Occupy Shenzhen, but for our little tightly wound industry, this ranks as an outburst. And there is perhaps some risk involved in making such statements. Jabil has been taking on a bigger helping of Apple’s pie, with Main today suggesting the visionaries behind the iPad and iPhone now represent more than 10% of the contract assembler’s revenue. Foxconn’s success has been tied in so small part too that of Apple’s and vice versa. For Apple to cut the cord, or even let it fray a bit, would run directly against the many years of staunch support for its China CM.
Then again, perhaps Jabil’s gains are coming at Foxconn’s expense, and Apple is basing its procurement decisions not just on cost and execution but also other, more humane factors.
Or so we can hope.
Way to go, Tim.
Making its way around the blogosphere is this New York Times’ article detailing the migration of Apple from the US to China.
According to the piece, Americans, Apple asserts, can’t match “the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers.” “We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The US has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”
With all due respect to the late Mr. Jobs, this is complete bull.
When all manufacturing equipment needs to be icon-based because the migrant workers who run it can’t read, that hardly qualifies as “flexible.” “Dumbed-down” is more like it. Since when is illiteracy a skill?
American engineering prowess is second to none. It’s difficult to find even a single feature — voice calling, GPS, web browsing, MP3 — on an iPhone that wasn’t invented at least in part in the US. The ideas conceived daily by our military contractors are matched only by their amazing ability to turn those ideas into reality. We have developed, for example, a weapon system that begins as an 18″ inch tube, but when launched, “sprouts” rigid wings like a hawk and rises thousands of feet, where it is invisible to detection. That device can then zero in on a designated target miles away, and once locked on, will thrust itself toward its “prey” — even if the latter is moving — and plant its payload — a bomb — in its target’s chest.
By contrast, what exactly is it Steve Jobs’ conceived — the rectangle?
Another current Apple executive reportedly said, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.” Non sequitur aside, what that arrogant remark ignores, of course, is that without American laws, Apple likely would no longer even exist. Indeed, Bill Gates provided then-struggling Apple with $150 million in 1997 and US anti-trust laws for years forced Microsoft to capitulate on its bundled software products in order to keep the competition alive.
There’s another missing point. High volume manufacturing is still performed all over the US, just not in electronics. So as we move toward more lights-out/true full automation factories for building electronics, there’s no reason to think that product won’t be built in volume here, too. Keep in mind that following the flooding in Thailand and Malaysia and the earthquake in Japan, the cluster factory model so popular in Southeast Asia is not looking quite so good.
And another! Apple’s outsourcing overseas model works well for building mobility products. It doesn’t work so well when you are outsourcing tractors. Jobs’ hubris led him to extrapolate that he since so good in design, he must also be brilliant in economics and sociology. Not even.
Apple now has nearly $100 billion in cash on hand. But it can’t afford American engineers? Huh.
Hitachi plans to outsource all its television production, becoming the latest Japanese OEM to exit TV manufacturing.
Which EMS company will benefit?
My money’s on — who else? — Foxconn. A year ago, Hon Hai (Foxconn’s trading name) reportedly was planning to invest in Hitachi’s Display Products Group. (Foxconn has a history of supporting the companies with which it hopes to do assembly or ODM business, and already builds TVs for Sony, Sharp and others.)
Meanwhile Flextronics, which has opened up considerable capacity by exiting the ODM PC business, does not seem to be a contender. The EMS company says it is trying to reduce its exposure to high-volume consumer electronics (along with its inherent cyclicality and margin-challenged ways).
Some of the other Taiwanese ODMs, such as Wistron and Pegatron, may be in the mix. Toshiba has history with both. Toshiba also outsources some television production Konka Group in China.
UP Media Group Inc. today announced Dr. Eric Bogatin will moderate the industry’s first “chat,” an open question/answer session using pioneering new software developed by UPMG.
The premiere event will be held Jan. 26, from 2 to 4 p.m. Eastern time, at Printed Circuit University. The second chat will feature SMT consultant Phil Zarrow and takes place Feb. 2 from 2 to 4 p.m. Eastern.
“Chats” refer to moderated question/answer sessions between an expert on a particular topic and any number of parties interested in the subject. Chats are conducted online, and attendees can submit questions privately via email in advance of the chat, or while the chat is live.
Moderators review the questions and choose which will be answered. As questions are answered, they appear online in sequential fashion. After each chat session is over, the transcript is made available for on-demand viewing. Transcripts are also searchable.
PCB Chat is an environment that emulates and captures the essence of online shared group communication without all the chaos of a free-form chat room. A chat operates more like the end of a presentation, where the audience asks questions of the speaker. It is controlled and systematic, and the moderator has full control over which questions or comments to address, ensuring the chat stays on topic.”
UPMG has invested several months of development work to realize the new software platform for PCB Chat.
Dr. Bogatin is perhaps the leading expert on printed circuit board signal integrity and transmission lines. He has a bachelor’s in physics from MIT, and master’s and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Arizona. He has held senior engineering and management positions at Bell Labs, Raychem, Sun Microsystems, Ansoft and Interconnect Devices. A prolific author, Dr. Bogatin has written six books on signal integrity and interconnect design and over 200 papers, including a regular column in PCD&F. He also has taught over 6,000 engineers over the past 20 years.
PRINTED CIRCUIT DESIGN & FAB and CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY magazines are media partners for the event.
From my early editor days, I’ve expressed thousandths of an inch in numerical form, not as X mils. So, for example, instead of “1 mil,” I would write “0.001.”
After 20 years, I am rethinking that convention. (I keep hoping it will all be overcome by a shift to metric, but that’s not just happening very fast now, is it?) And I am willing to accept reader input. Which do you prefer: mils or numbers?
You might say humans are predisposed to chatting. The art has taken a few twists and turns over time: in the past 50 years the back-fence gossip session gave way to party lines (for some), then to online means so popular and ubiquitous it made AOL for a time one of the most valuable companies in the US.
To be sure, the AOL-style chat rooms were (are?) fun, but ultimately more of a time-waster than a problem solver. (Unless, of course, wasting time is the problem to be solved.) But the basic concept – interacting with peers without leaving the cozy confines of your home – is transcendent. For years, we’ve been working at developing a mechanism that emulates and captures the essence of online shared group communication without all the chaos of a free-form chat room.
At long last, we think we have it.
A year ago, we acquired BeTheSignal, the brainchild of signal integrity guru Dr. Eric Bogatin, in large part for the slick web-based platform he had developed. We rolled that in to Printed Circuit University, our founder and owner Pete Waddell’s vision for a comprehensive website dedicated to training printed circuit board designers, fabricators and assemblers.
On the heels of that acquisition, we began in earnest to develop a unique “moderated chat” environment, under which our readers could engage in question/answer sessions with experts on a particular topic. The idea is simple: Chats are conducted online at a set date and time. Attendees can privately submit questions via email in advance of the chat, or through the site itself while the chat is “live.” The moderator – typically an expert in some aspect of PCB technology – can review the questions and choose which to answer. As questions are answered, they appear online in sequential fashion.
Each chat session will have a specific time length, after which a transcript will be made available for on-demand viewing. Most sessions will last for 60 to 120 minutes. We foresee chat session topics ranging from the broad to the specific. In some cases, the topic will be the driver, such as discussions of market or packaging trends, for example. In other cases, the presenter will be the attraction, because of their “name” and reputation in the industry.
UPMG plans to enlist the leading names in electronics design from around the world to hold chats in their respective regions. The emphasis in most sessions will be on the specific over the general; for example, “layout and routing of cellphone boards” would be preferred to “layout and routing.” (For our advertisers, sponsorships will be available on a one-per-chat basis.)
PCB Chat is a one-of-a-kind opportunity for tens of thousands of industry technologists to come virtually face-to-face with their peers to ask questions and share problems and solutions in real time. Needless to say, we are thrilled at this development. Visit PrintedCircuitUniversity.com for a look, and watch our websites and digital newsletter for the first scheduled chats to be revealed.
While I’m pleased to see IPC is taking a stand in urging the US State Department to take a harder line when it comes to the potential export printed circuit board design data, it must have been cause for no small amount of angst in Bannockburn over whether IPC should be involved at all.
To bring readers up to speed, IPC seeks to make clear that ITAR covers PCB designs intended for defense equipment.
While it seems patently obvious that PCB data should be on the ITAR list, it puts IPC in the semi-awkward position. The largest PCB supplier to the US DoD is TTM Technologies, with about $170 million in defense sales through the first three quarters of last year. TTM’s largest shareholder is a Chinese national. And TTM’s COO is on the IPC board of directors.
So does IPC support the continued DoD drive for COTS products, keeping with the Perry Initiative of 1994, which some cite as the beginning of the end for the US PCB industry?* (COTS in effect forces prices to their lowest common denominator, which gives certain offshore suppliers a leg up on their US competitors.) Does it seek to aid the competitiveness of a major member? Or does it put the interest of the multinational members that want the lowest prices, regardless of the potential security risks? What about the potential risk to the US PCB infrastructure? Which of these priorities should take precedence?
*I don’t agree, but that’s a different blog.