The 2011 International Circuit Board and Electronic Assembly Exhibition was held in Shenzhen yesterday. More than 350 leading suppliers from home and abroad attended the exhibition. The reporter visited and found that the current situation of circuit board industry can be described as "a few happy and a few sad".

A senior manufacturer of soft circuit board substrates in Guangdong told reporters that the circuit board industry began to decline from the middle of this year, next year is not optimistic, until the year after the industry may turn around. At present, large manufacturers are less affected, while medium and small manufacturers can not even receive orders, and the industry overcapacity problem is prominent. As a result, the company says it is upgrading its products and shifting production to new ones.

In his speech yesterday, Mr Philip Bing-yiu, Principal Consultant of the Automotive and Electronics Division of the Hong Kong Productivity Council, pointed out that LED lighting has taken off in many countries in recent years due to the government's environmental concerns and technological advances in the lighting industry.

When it comes to the impact of LED on the circuit board industry, the above manufacturers said that LED is currently in its infancy, the market space is not open, and the proportion of sales revenue is relatively low, but most PCB (printed circuit board) manufacturers are actively preparing for a piece of the pie.

A company based in Suzhou that produces high-end PCB told reporters that they mainly produce circuit boards for mobile phones. Generally speaking, this year is a little weak, because Europe, India and other markets have shrunk. But the company is more optimistic about next year: "Next year will be better than this year. Because domestic mobile phones are becoming more popular with smart phones; In India, Africa, and South America, where mobile phones are not widely used, there is a large market space. Moreover, the company is also entering the automobile and industrial control sectors.

One billion smartphones will be shipped in 2015, according to a recent estimate by the Association of Connected Electronics Industries. According to ABI Research, 302 million smartphones were shipped last year, up 71% from a year earlier.

Domestic circuit board industry related companies are Shengyi technology, ultrasonic electronics, Tianjin Prinplin, Zhongjing Electronics, etc.

Yue Changlin reports from Shenzhen