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26 SMT Magazine • December 2015 by Stephen Las marias i-ConnECT007 IPC President and CEO John Mitchell pro- vides the basic overview of IPC—Association Connecting Electronics Industries, its goals and basic mission, activities, and how it best serves its membership. Also included is a snapshot of how IPC promotes technology development in the industry through standardization. Q: What is ipc's basic mission? A: IPC is a global, member-driven organization. As such, our mission is simple: serve the electron - ics industry. Whatever our members need to be competitive and successful in the marketplace, we deliver upon that need. This includes provid- ing our members with standards, training and certification, market research, education, public policy advocacy and solutions to industry issues. IPC programs and services are dedicated to fur- thering the competitive excellence and financial success or our members through increasing end- product quality and reliability, improving com- munication externally and internally, and man- aging and reducing cost. Q: please summarize your membership stats. A: We currently have more than 3,700 member companies, and operate offices and training cen- ters across the globe. In order for us to serve our members, we need to be readily accessible and available. That is why IPC's offices span across Chi- na, India, Russia, Europe, and the United States. It is the best way to serve the entire electronics in- dustry supply chain, which includes OEMs, EMS companies, suppliers, PCB manufacturers, govern- ment, and academia. And because the electronics industry is so diverse, our member companies are comprised of many different industry segments such as aerospace, defense, , medical, automotive, industrial, and telecommunications. Q: What is ipc's approach to hosting events? A: Being an association, hosting events is one of the ways we can effectively reach out to the industry. We are continually creating network- ing opportunities to bring industry profession- als together whether it's through standards de- velopment activities or workshops, webinars, training sessions and conferences. Our largest annual event is IPC APEX EXPO, which will be FeATure inTerview