PCB Blog - What is EMS Manufacturing

EMS Manufacturing is an emerging industry, which refers to manufacturers that provide a series of services such as manufacturing, procurement, partial design and logistics for electronic product brand owners.

Compared with traditional OEM or ODM services that only provide product design and OEM production, EMS companies provide knowledge and management services, such as material management logistics and transportation, and even product maintenance services.

In fact, the production process involves many processes and links. EMS is a full-line service, including product development and product production, which of course includes product procurement, product quality management and transportation logistics. Generally, EMS includes all of the above. But when we started, we were not able to start the whole process. Therefore, we mainly helped customers with the processing part, so we only took charge of the production part, which is the so-called ODM (Original Equipment Manufacture). Later, we developed to the point where we could help some customers with product development and design work, which is the so-called ODM (Original Design Manufacture).

In other words, ODM has added new elements compared to OEM. In addition to doing what ODM and OEM do, EMS now also takes on the logistics part, and even helps customers with sales. This is the general EMS.

Panorama of EMS Manufacturing Industry Chain

In the upstream of the electronic manufacturing service industry, it mainly includes raw materials such as electronic device supply, integrated circuits, printed circuit boards and transistors; the midstream is electronic manufacturing services, raw material procurement, product assembly, warehousing and logistics; in the downstream application scenarios, it is represented by electronic product brands, communication base stations, data centers and new energy fields.

EMS Manufacturing

Analysis of the development status of the EMS manufacturing industry

The production line process of EMS is a precise and complex process, covering multiple key steps. First, based on the design documents provided by the customer, the EMS foundry company conducts engineering review and design verification to ensure the manufacturability of the product and meets the customer's needs. Next, parts procurement is carried out to obtain the required electronic components and materials from reliable suppliers. Once the parts are ready, the EMS foundry company enters the manufacturing stage. This includes manufacturing processes such as surface mount technology (SMT) and through-hole technology (DIP). SMT technology is used to accurately solder tiny electronic components to printed circuit boards (PCBs), while DIP technology is used to solder plug-ins and other components. During the manufacturing process, strict quality control and product testing must be carried out to ensure that the product meets quality standards. After completing manufacturing, the EMS foundry company performs product assembly, testing and packaging. This includes functional testing, appearance inspection and quality verification of products, and packaging according to customer requirements, ready for delivery to the market.

EMS manufacturing market distribution, scale and structure

With the gradual rise of intelligent manufacturing applications, the electronic information manufacturing industry has been driven to develop in the direction of intelligence. At the same time, the market space for electronic product demand is getting larger and larger. Electronic manufacturing services (EMS) as a new production model of the electronics industry has begun to spread globally, and the overall market size has shown a rising trend.

According to the analysis report released by Beijing Yanjing Bizhi Information Consulting, the global electronic manufacturing services (EMS) industry market size in 2021 has reached nearly US$490 billion, an increase of approximately US$45 billion compared with the same period last year, a year-on-year increase of approximately 10.1%; by the end of 2022, the overall size of the electronic manufacturing services (EMS) market has exceeded US$500 billion, reaching about US$525 billion, an increase of approximately US$35 billion from 2021, a year-on-year increase of approximately 7.1%.

In terms of the development of various regions around the world, the global electronic manufacturing service industry is currently experiencing a stage of transfer from developed countries such as the United States to emerging countries such as the Asia-Pacific region. According to the revenue scale of enterprises in the industry, by the end of 2021, the revenue of electronic manufacturing service companies in the Asia-Pacific region accounted for 70% of the global market size, while the Americas represented by the United States accounted for only about 20%. As the regions represented by the Asia-Pacific region are facing economic transformation and upgrading in recent years, the growing market demand has stimulated the stable development of the region. For the electronic manufacturing service industry, the development of the downstream terminal market will bring new development opportunities for the industry.

In recent years, the global EMS industry has been developing at a relatively fast pace. From the perspective of market structure, consumer electronics products are currently the largest market segment. According to the latest market research data, consumer electronics products accounted for about 40% of the global EMS market in 2021; followed by communications and transportation, with market shares of about 33% and 10% respectively. As the global digitalization process is accelerating, it will effectively drive the application of EMS in industries such as medical care, big data and new energy. It is preliminarily predicted that the future EMS market structure will gradually change.

The above is an introduction to ems manufacturing.