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croteyesterday at 10:19 AM3 repliesview on HN

Could you perhaps share those PCBA businesses with us?

I tried quite hard to find them when I was still in the hardware world, and I never managed to find anything even remotely close to what China offers at less than 10x the price.

I'd love to give it another shot for some hobby projects if the industry has indeed changed in the last few years!


Replies

abielefeldyesterday at 11:53 AM

I think the original commenter means companies that manufacture their own products but do not offer manufacturing services.

You can't beat JLC because the model from JLC is that they lose money on all order less than 100 boards, so that they win order of 10 to 100k+

If you work in germany in engineering, you know a lot of mittelstand (SMEs) actually have some production machinery, as said, usually they have between 50 and 200 employees, and they manufacture pretty niche products up to 10k units a year or so.

They do not advertise this, as their business model is not manufacturing, it's selling their own products.

I am actually the speaker of the talk, and for us, manufacturing is not a business model either, it's just the capability we want to develop. Our business model would be to sell products. We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.

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PinguTSyesterday at 10:47 AM

I can't share the name. I don't know their prices. I know that they are in Eastern Europe.

From my knowledge, the last time (2022ish) we talked about that was, that they don't take new customers for now. They are working at capacity.

fockyesterday at 11:46 AM

probably the likes of Enics and GPV - nowadays this is likely a field overrun by military demand and private equity squeezing the supply side... Also I doubt that they can/want to compete with jlcpcb et al.