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PCB-Aug2016

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August 2016 • The PCB Magazine 27 SPIRIT CIRCUITS: BUILDING A NEW FACTORY IN ROMANIA...WITH AN ALEX STEPINSKI INFLUENCE not have any preconceived ideas. We are also very keen to work with the universities. We've aligned ourselves with a couple of universities where there are some very intelligent young peo- ple coming out of university with not very good prospects in the towns that they are living in. There are some very large companies in Craiova that have shed lots of jobs, so we are able to offer some encouragement to these people. Matties: Aside from perhaps economics, why wouldn't you start with the Phase 3 model? I un- derstand you have the equipment in hand. Driver: We don't have the demand and the risk is mitigated in what we're doing because everything that we're going to be making in Romania we currently buy in China, so we're going there with an order book. If we were to start with something different to what we cur- rently have as orders, we'd then have to go and fill the plant, whereas we are building this now where one customer already satisfies one shift. Our whole objective of this is to repatriate some of the work that we're doing in China, where we have a very small margin, and give our cus- tomers better agility. If we bring product by sea, you're typically looking at 10–12 week total lead times, and customers are changing their minds during that period. Bring it by air and we lose the margin on the freight, so we're doing this with a known order book. That's what is miti- gating the risk and that's the attraction. Matties: It's a mirror of what you're doing. Driver: It's literally repatriating the work and us- ing our existing order book. Yes, I would love to build a factory like Alex Stepinski and have a digital plated-through-hole factory. We don't have that as an order book at the moment but that will be our Phase 3. We will go for digi- tal manufacturing of plated-through multilayer once we've got ourselves established. There also is the risk factor of not having any skilled la- bor available in the country. We're starting from zero with the labor. Once we've got some basic skills there, we can then build on those skills. Matties: That would almost make the case for jumping to Phase 3 first, because the reduction of skill in Phase 3. Driver: It would, but then you need the money to build the plant. We don't have the money. Matties: Right, that would be finances aside. Driver: Finances aside, yes, I'd probably go straight into phase three. If I had $10 million to go and build a factory I'd probably go for it. We could make it a digital, hands-off operation, although it's never really hands-off. Matties: No, I think Alex has 17 people where nor- mally it would be 70 or 80. How about waste treat- ment over there? How do you handle that? Are you going for a zero-discharge setup? Driver: We are engaged with Alex and we're looking for zero discharge. Alex was here at the weekend and he is going to be engaged with us with some of his innovations on waste treat- ment. I'm impressed with his thought process. Matties: The nice thing about what Alex is doing is he's repurposing equipment that already exists to achieve the goal. It's not a lot of special new technology that you have to chase. Driver: He's being disruptive and he's challeng- ing the norm. I have 15 years on Alex and have been making boards a lot longer and it's annoy- ing, some of the obvious things that he's chal-

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