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18 PCB007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2019 output in Europe is 115,800 euros (908,000 yu- an), which shows that Europe is much more efficient than China. China's PCB production continues to expand and has been more cau- tious (but not halted) of late due to the begin- ning of the U.S.-China trade war. I know that China has at least 35–40 new large factories under construction. In a few years, when all of these new factories start to produce PCBs, China's production may account for more than 70% of global production, and Chinese manu- facturers will occupy more of the top positions on the NTI-100 list. Automotive PCB Manufacturers Automotive has become an important mar- ket for PCB, accounting for almost 10% of the total. In the future, the total volume of the au- tomotive market will not change much, even though the content of automotive electronic devices is expected to grow at a consistent pace. Consequently, automotive PCB manufac- turers will see better performance. NTI lists the world's 20 largest automotive PCB manufac- turers in Table 5, which are among the world's top PCB manufacturers. revenue reporting. For example, Multek's rev- enue will be merged into Mflex's. If there is no separate PCB business report for a diversified company, the report will be estimated. Many PCB manufacturers are now also en- gaged in assembly. Since the data for bare board and assembly are typically not separat- ed, the statistics also include part of assem- bly, especially the FPCB production value. This situation may tend to inflate the sales numbers as reported. For this type of manufacturer, the actual bare board revenue may be only 50% of the reported total. Some PCB manufacturers' income includes subcontracting or consign- ment value, which cannot be removed if it is calculated repeatedly (Table 4). NTI data has always been higher than the common Prismark data. The process by which Prismark tabulates its data is not clear to me. For example, if you look at the global PCB market output in 2018, according to NTI, the market is about 74.5 billion USD, which is an increase of 5.6% over the previous year. Yet ac- cording to Prismark, the market is about 62.4 million USD, which is an increase of 6.0% over the previous year. The gap between the two analyses amounts to more than 10 billion USD. It is not clear which one is correct and/or which one is closer to the truth. In the industry, both of these data are cited, creating a sort of bounding box for the market. For the reference, while NTI and Prismark are different in how they tell the rise and fall of PCB market, the trends identified in both reports agree with each other. Having a grasp on the market trend is often more important in the industry than the actual numbers themselves. According to NTI, PCB production in North America, Japan, and Europe, though very strong in the past, is now hitting rock-bottom, and that industry growth comes from overseas factories. PCB plants in Europe are investing, not to expand the scale, but rather to focus on technological upgrades to meet the needs of new products. According to the PCB output and the number of employees in Europe, the average annual per capita Table 5: The world's 20 largest automotive PCB fabricators.