Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1484263
NOVEMBER 2022 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 89 them, there is a link to the quality of their products. Johnson: Obviously a long-term solution is more local manufacturing, but with all the pricing and demand challenges in getting your materials either into the fac- tories you're using or shipped to the cus- tomers, how do you manage that? How do you make sure that customers aren't worrying about that? Miralles: Today, we have more capacity in terms of transportation, but mostly because of the decrease in demand. ere are two factors. First, we had the capacity issue regarding the COVID situation and we are at the end of that situation. Capac- ity is increasing because the demand is decreased. ere is a strong relationship between transportation and the world market: When the world market is decreasing, we have more transportation capacity but the price also goes down. Today our strategy is not so complicated, but we have to be flexible. is means we don't have long-term contracts with the forwarder because we want to be close to the price market on a frequent basis. We nego- tiate our costs every three months with our forwarder, to be closer to reality. Secondly, before I came on board, we started consolida- tion, meaning that we decrease the number of entries in Europe, for example, or shipment to the U.S. to have the maximum volume in order to have the benefits of consolidation and decrease the final price per customer. Finally, if we do that, we have internal discussions about our strategy in front of the customer, whereas, in the past, the logic was to have a warehouse or facilities close to the customers. We don't want to change completely, of course. We only have a few facilities to serve— Europe. We need to be flexible, and maybe with the logic we are putting in place, we need the same logic for a period of time, meaning one or two years. But it's possible to update our offers often to be really close to the customers' expectations. Johnson: What is in the near future for ICAPE Group? Miralles: We have made some strategic acqui- sitions in the last year. There should be new opportunities to offer our customers and the possibility to manufacture PCBs ourselves. Martin: We currently own two manufactur- ing facilities, one in the U.S. and one in South Africa. Miralles: This is an important point because part of our strategy is to be close to the cus- tomer and to be able to manage a wide variety of products. Johnson: Absolutely. With that we will close. Thank you. PCB007 • Sponsored link ICAPE Group, The power of precision (icape-group.com)