Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1537054
16 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2025 Last time I visited Green Circuits, I was impressed by your box build operations. Is part of your niche offering your customers a more complete assembly service? Yes, certainly. We do everything from design onward and can step in at any point. We help with re-design for production. We will go all the way through to box build. We've seen box build grow quite a bit as customers increasingly want more taken off their plates and one sup- plier to support as many of their needs as possible. Our box build area is 15% of our pro- duction floor, up from a small workstation a few years ago. In your space, you're responsible for taking that design file and turning it into the very first man- ifestation of their design, which requires hand- holding and preparatory work. Does it make sense to keep it with you as long as possible? Development cycles are faster in the industries we serve. We frequently see customers do an iteration and then a new revision in six to 12 months. They need someone that can get it into the field quickly and engage with them in real-time. We often bring customers in-house during their design process to make changes as their job progresses along the floor. We can support pulling product off the floor, redesigning, and flushing it right back through. That starts to feel like a captive assembly house. That's our goal. We want to be your in-house ser- vice. We have a number of customers with their own facilities that have outsourced to us—not necessarily because they can't do it themselves, but because they need the additional bandwidth. We allow them to focus on other things of more value to their company internally while we handle their day-to-day R&D throughput or production, if they prefer. Let's look at market dynamics. With tariffs, overly optimized supply chains, and China Plus One, do you feel pushed or pulled to go in a new direction? I joined Green Circuits four years ago. We rebuilt the leadership team and refocused on what we viewed as the real strengths of this business: our ability to be hands-on and to deliver remarkable complexity. One of our more complex boards is 96 layers and 17,000 placements; it's just a mas- sively complex board. So, we've seen some pretty astounding things. Of course, we'll also do single boards that are quite small, but it was very clear to me and to the leadership team that staying focused on complex builds was important. There's a high need for it. Within that, the market has accelerated over the last five years. We see a higher velocity of R&D turns and a higher velocity of IoT. We have been talking about technology being integrated into every aspect of our lives and industry for years. Now, we're actually seeing it coming to fruition at a really rapid pace across a very diverse set of applications. From a military aspect, it's no longer only about the large defense systems, fighters, air- craft, and ships. There's a lot more agility required. Global conflicts have demonstrated the need for rapid changes in drone and other technologies. We've seen a new mindset in how the U.S. military will be defending our country. On the medical side, there's rapid growth and innovation in the use of circuit boards and elec- tronics in all manner of applications, including ther- apy devices, prosthetics, sensing devices, treat- ment devices, surgical devices. Those newer appli- cations have helped us fuel our growth. Now, regarding the global supply chain, we believe there needs to be a rebalance. The belief is that we'll get there, but it won't be as instanta- neous as the casual observer would like to see. That's true in Europe and Asia as well. While I see a lot of interest in the reshoring effort, there's also a broad lack of understanding of what it will take to deliver those results. One point of concern is capital investment for capacity. Many companies currently produc- ing products offshore come to us and want to run 50,000 or more units. I may have the capability and Michael Hinshaw