Printed circuit board fabrication

Citation

Custer, W. (2000), "Printed circuit board fabrication", Circuit World, Vol. 26 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/cw.2000.21726aab.022

Printed circuit board fabrication

Printed circuit board fabrication

Viasystems is acquiring the PCB manufacturing division ("Kalex") of Termbray Industries International for $325 million. Viasystems is financing the acquisition through a placement of $200 million of Viasystems common stock and additional bank borrowings. Kalex has two operations in China with annual production capacity of over 15 million square feet for double-sided and multilayer PCBs.

Pacific Circuits, Redmond WA and Power Circuits, Santa Ana CA merged. Combined, the companies have over 950 employees and revenues in excess of $125 million. Thayer Capital Partners, Washington DC, and Brockway Moran & Partners,

Boca Raton, Florida, own the majority of the shares of the combined businesses.

Innovex bought ADFlex for $3.80 per share and ADFlex became a wholly owned subsidiary. Innovex will continue to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol INVX. The combined company is the largest flexible circuit manufacturer in N. America with annualized pro forma revenues of $230 million.

A year after it purchased Intergraph's PCB factory, Praegitzer served Intergraph with a $25 million lawsuit ­ one month after it was charged with breach of contract by Intergraph. Praegitzer's lawsuit claims Intergraph gave it inaccurate sales and production information prior to buying Intergraph's Huntsville, AL plant in March 1998 for $16 million.

Johnson Matthey sold its electronic materials unit (including its ACI PCB fabs) to AlliedSignal for $655 million.

AlliedSignal sold its Laminate Systems business to Rütgers AG (Isola's parent).

The 3M Electronic Products Division's new $300 million, 580,000 square feet manufacturing plant in Singapore has begun production of 3M Microflex circuits. The facility is one of the largest flex circuit manufacturing plants in the world, and is the largest factory 3M has ever built at one time. Target markets include interconnects between inkjet cartridges and printers; replacement of individual lead wires in hard disk drive applications ("flex on suspension"); primary circuit boards in medical applications such as hearing aids; and as an interconnect interposer between the silicon and the PC board in integrated circuit packages.