⚡ Silicon & Steel · The Board
PCB Story 4 of 4: the players
Ever wondered why nearly 60 Chinese and Taiwanese circuit board makers built factories in Thailand in under three years?
That is what reporting in September 2025 found. The world's largest board maker, Zhen Ding, started trial production at its first Thai plant in May 2025. Japan's CMK, which earns most of its money from car electronics, began making automotive boards there in the second half of 2024.
To understand why, you need two maps and one uncomfortable number. Eight minutes. Here is the whole board.
📖 In plain words: the terms you need
Made in vs owned by. Where a factory sits is not the same as where the company that owns it is headquartered. Country-of-origin rules follow the factory; pricing and allocation follow the headquarters.
Tier 1 supplier. The company that sells a finished module, such as an engine controller or radar unit, directly to a car maker. Bosch, Denso and Aumovio are examples.
Board maker. The factory that turns laminate into a finished bare circuit board.
Laminate maker. The company that turns glass cloth, resin and copper foil into the laminate sheet boards are cut from.
Weaver. The company that weaves glass yarn into glass cloth.
Prismark. The research firm most of the industry uses for board market sizes and rankings. Where to check it: Prismark's free "What's New" page and its annual Global Leading PCB Companies report.
♟️ The chess move
🎯 THE WHAT
Board making left the West over two decades because it looked like the least strategic part of electronics. It went mostly to China, and much of it is owned from Taiwan. Now customers want boards from somewhere other than China, and the same companies are moving again, to Southeast Asia.
The playbook: Own the unglamorous middle of the chain, then move your factories to wherever customers want the label to say. The factory address changes. The owner, and the allocation decisions, do not.
🔍 The breakdown
⚙️ THE HOW
1. The first map: where boards are made
Around 2000, the United States made more than 30% of the world's circuit boards, according to an IPC report cited by ITIF. China made less than 10%, per Prismark. By 2020, the US share was about 4%. Prismark expects China to make about 60% in 2026.
That is a very large relocation of an industry, and it happened within a single working career.
2. It was not lost in a fight. It left.
Board making was labour-intensive, chemical-heavy, low-margin and highly cyclical. Industry analyses of the North American decline point to the same forces. Production followed electronics assembly to lower-cost regions. Stricter environmental and safety rules raised costs at home. The skilled workforce shrank, and repeated downturns starved factories of investment.
For decades the board looked like the least strategic part of the chain, so letting it go looked cheap. Story 1 showed what that costs in 2026: a buyer looking for an alternative source usually finds another Asian supplier in the same materials queue.
3. The second map: who owns the factories
Here is the twist most "China makes everything" coverage misses. Prismark counts the industry two ways. By location, China is expected to host about 60% of production in 2026. By company headquarters, Chinese companies made only about 36% of production value in 2025, and Taiwanese companies about 30%.
The gap is largely Taiwanese companies running factories in mainland China and, increasingly, Southeast Asia. A board stamped with a Chinese factory address may belong to a company headquartered in Taipei.
4. The players
Prismark's ranking by 2024 revenue: five Taiwanese companies and three Chinese ones in the top ten, by Prismark's own classification of headquarters. The only American name is TTM Technologies, in sixth. Japan's entry, Nippon Mektron, is the flexible circuit business of NOK.
The ranking is moving. Prismark's 2025 figures, as reported in May 2026, show AI-exposed makers such as Victory Giant and WUS climbing. That fits the two-speed market from Story 1.
5. Who is where
Taiwan owns many of the biggest board makers, including Zhen Ding and Unimicron, a leading chip substrate maker, plus laminate makers Elite Material, ITEQ and Nan Ya.
China has the volume and much of the laminate: most of the world's board production, the largest laminate maker by market share, Kingboard, plus Shengyi and the glass fibre giant China Jushi.
South Korea makes substrates, through Samsung Electro-Mechanics and LG Innotek.
Thailand is the new hub, home to automotive board specialist KCE Electronics and now to plants from many of the names above.
The US and Europe have a handful of significant players, led by TTM and Austria's AT&S.
The full list, by headquarters country, not factory location:
Glass cloth and yarn
Japan: Nittobo, Asahi Kasei
Taiwan: Taiwan Glass, Nan Ya
China: China Jushi, Kingboard
Specialty resin and film
Japan: Resonac, Mitsubishi Gas Chemical, Ajinomoto
Laminate (CCL)
Japan: Resonac, Panasonic
Taiwan: Nan Ya, Elite Material, ITEQ, Taiwan Union
China: Kingboard, Shengyi
South Korea: Doosan
Board makers
Japan: Nippon Mektron
Taiwan: Zhen Ding, Compeq, Tripod, WUS, Gold Circuit
China: Dongshan Precision, Shennan Circuits, Victory Giant, Kinwong
Elsewhere: TTM (US)
Substrates
Japan: Ibiden
Taiwan: Unimicron
South Korea: Samsung Electro-Mechanics, LG Innotek
Elsewhere: AT&S (Austria)
Large automotive business
Japan: CMK, Meiko
Taiwan: Chin Poon
Elsewhere: KCE Electronics (Thailand)
6. The map that matters to a car maker
A car maker rarely buys a circuit board directly. It buys a module from a Tier 1 supplier such as Bosch, Denso or Aumovio, the former automotive business of Continental, which listed separately in September 2025. The Tier 1 buys the board from a board maker, which buys laminate from a laminate maker, which buys glass cloth from a weaver.
Each step adds a margin, a lead time and a decision about who gets served first. The buyer at the end sees only the last one. By the time a glass cloth allocation in Japan reaches an automotive purchasing team, it has become a Tier 1 price increase with a one-word explanation: materials.
The constraint sits two purchases upstream of a Tier 1 buyer, and three upstream of a car maker. The most useful move is to ask your Tier 1 who supplies the laminate in your boards, then read what that laminate maker and its glass supplier say publicly. Every company named in this series publishes something.
"The constraint sits several purchases upstream of the person paying for it."
📊 The numbers
As of September 2026.
Measure | Value |
|---|---|
US share of world PCB production | >30% (c. 2000) → ~4% (2020) |
China share of world PCB production | <10% (2000) → ~60% (2026, expected) |
Share by company headquarters, 2025 | China ~36%, Taiwan ~30% |
Largest board maker, 2024 revenue | Zhen Ding, $5.34bn |
Top ten by headquarters, 2024 | Taiwan 5, China 3, Japan 1, US 1 |
Chinese and Taiwanese board makers setting up in Thailand | nearly 60, in under three years |
Thailand's PCB output, 2024 | ~$3.5bn |
CMK revenue from automotive boards, 2024 | 85.5% |
💼 The investor read
Unlike many chokepoints in the chip supply chain, most of the key companies on this map are publicly listed. The notable exception is Bosch, which is mostly owned by a charitable foundation. That makes this chain unusually easy to follow.
Thailand capacity cuts both ways. It diversifies supply away from China. It also adds a lot of capacity at once, which can turn into oversupply if demand softens, as substrate makers found in 2023. KCE Electronics (SET: KCE) is arguably the listed company most exposed to its new neighbours.
TTM Technologies (NASDAQ: TTMI) is the only US-headquartered name in the top ten, with factories in North America and Asia. It is the clearest listed exposure to any push for domestic board production.
The investor read is analysis of industry structure, not investment advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. I hold no positions in the companies covered and take no payment from them. Do your own work.
🧾 What I'm assuming
The shift map mixes years, each labelled: US figures from an IPC report (about 2000 and 2020), China's 2026 figure is Prismark's expectation, Thailand's is 2024 output against Prismark's 2024 world total.
I could not find reliable public shares for Japan and Europe around 2000, so they are not plotted.
"It left" is an interpretation of industry analyses. Policy, currency and competition also played roles I have not weighted.
The location-versus-headquarters gap is attributed mainly to Taiwanese-owned factories outside Taiwan. Prismark does not publish that split directly, and the two numbers are from different years.
Headquarters follow Prismark's classification. WUS, for example, operates mainly from Kunshan and is listed in Shenzhen, but Prismark counts it as Taiwanese, reflecting its founding group.
The 2025 ranking is reported, not verified; the 2024 ranking is from Prismark's own publication.
The four-purchase chain is typical, not universal. Some car makers buy boards more directly, and some Tier 1s make their own.
"Nearly 60" companies in Thailand comes from one press report citing Nikkei Asia and a Taiwanese research centre.
🕳️ The rabbit hole
🧭 THE WHERE
1. Prismark: Global Leading PCB Companies, the company-by-company source for the ranking [30 min]
2. Nation Thailand on the PCB migration [5 min]
3. China Controls the Periodic Table, our own series on another chain where processing, not mining, sets the terms [6 min]
📬 The series
PCB Story 1: Why Your PCB Quote Went Up
The price on your desk, and why buyers outside AI are waiting in a queue.
PCB Story 2: Your AI Cluster Runs on Cloth
Why a woven glass fabric decides what an AI computer can do.
PCB Story 3: Nobody Is Getting Rid of the Circuit Board
Why the board keeps losing work to the chip package, and gets harder to make anyway.
PCB Story 4: The Map (you are here)
Who makes the board, where, and how the map came to look this way.
Four stories, one argument. The circuit board looked like the boring part of electronics. In 2026 it is a queue (Story 1), set by a woven glass cloth (Story 2). It is getting harder to make, not easier (Story 3). And it sits on a map drawn decades ago, when the board looked like it would never matter (this story).
One question to sit with: do you know the name of the company that weaves the glass inside your boards?
Silicon & Steel Intelligence Desk · The Board. If I get something wrong, tell me: [email protected]. Coffee invite open to everyone, free or paid.
