PCB007 Magazine

PCB007-May2020

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MAY 2020 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 17 dational business, and it has been unaffect- ed. We haven't seen any drop off in orders or buying patterns in the aerospace and defense market due to this situation. With our wireless infrastructure business, the big needle move there are 5G deployments, and as we see Chi- na coming out of the initial impact, we saw a little bit of a push in Q1 to Q2 in the 5G deploy- ments; however, the Chinese economy is using 5G to kickstart the economy again, so we're seeing that business picking back up nicely right now. Automotive is the one area where we see a major drop off, as the automakers shut their factories, their demand has dropped off. Au- tomotive is the main downside, but wireless is staying strong because of the 5G deploy- ments. And aerospace and defense are good with steady growth. Dan Feinberg: Do you see any changes to your supply chain due to the movement not to sup- ply things from China? Tushingham: Most of the materials made in our Asian locations are consumed in Asia, so we have not seen a great shift in the supply chain, in general. Over the past several years, we've been making changes to improve supply sta- bility, and this has been very beneficial during the pandemic. We have a global footprint, so we have facilities in China, Europe, and both coasts of the U.S. About five years ago, we made a concerted effort to make sure that as many of our products as possible were quali- fied in multiple locations. While customers might prefer them to be shipped from one location, we have the ability to ship to them from multiple locations. And as this COVID situation evolved, it was first in China, so our Chinese facility was impacted, but we were able to move the supply of that material that would have normally been sup- plied from China to our Arizona and Belgium locations. Then, as China came back online, in terms of the factory coming back online, the next concern was Europe. Our factory was im- pacted in Europe, but we were able to move that volume into our China and U.S. locations. Now, as more of the impact is in the U.S., we've been able to supply those customers that were buying from the U.S. from our Chinese and Eu- ropean locations. We've always managed to pick up any of the reduction in supplies from any location through our other factories globally. It's helpful that we have this global, qualified capacity. With that qualified capacity, we've also made concert- ed efforts in the supply chain to have locally sourced raw materials, wherever possible. Our factories operate, to a large extent, with raw materials coming from their regions in order to minimize lead times and total supply lead time, as well as make things more efficient. The actions we've been taking for the last five years have paid dividends in this situation, and our customers have seen a minimal im- pact. We have pushed out lead times a little bit from some of our locations, but we saw China quickly get back to standard lead times. Bel- gium and Arizona are now back at standard lead times. The East Coast of the U.S. is the one area where we've had to push out the lead times at the moment. Barry Matties: Your manufacturing is situated to where your demand is by region. Tushingham: Yes, whenever possible. For exam- ple, if we sell to an automotive tier one, our design sales effort may primarily be in Europe with the designers at their facilities, but our sales could be to a fabricator in Taiwan or Chi- na. We supply those fabricators out of our Chi- nese manufacturing facilities. We haven't seen any impact from customers saying, "Thou shall not ship from China." In fact, most of them We've always managed to pick up any of the reduction in supplies from any location through our other factories globally.

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