PCB industry: Supply situation upwards Business expectations downwards. Regarding the situation in the PCB industry, the ZVEI currently states that the phase of significantly overheated incoming orders in the PCB industry is slowly coming to an end. Incoming orders have already fallen moderately for the third consecutive quarter and are thus approaching the three-year average again. "Although they are still above the figures from 2019 and 2020, they have fallen compared to the same quarter of the previous year.
Turnover in the sector increased slightly compared to the previous quarter. It remains at a high level, which has been significantly higher than the turnover of the two previous years since the start of 2021. However, the figure for the same quarter of the previous year could not be matched in terms of turnover either. The number of employees continued to rise slightly and recently reached a record level in a three-year comparison. Per capita sales rose to their highest level since the beginning of 2019, which can be attributed to the fact that the tense situation regarding the availability of materials has improved noticeably. This halted a three-quarter downward trend and turned it into a positive trend.
The order backlog grew to a new record level for the seventh consecutive quarter. As the industry was able to increase production in the plants and at the same time the far above-average order intake of the previous quarters fell slightly, the book-to-bill ratio for the first quarter of 2022 fell again, but was balanced at 1.01. The industry can look forward to an order backlog that offers a comfortable order range of around 150 working days of capacity utilization at the current production output.
Business expectations at the end of the first quarter are significantly more pessimistic, even in the shadow of the Russia-Ukraine war: 25% of reporting companies expect their own economic development to deteriorate (previous quarter: 0%). The number of economic optimists fell significantly from 29% to just 8%. A total of 67% of companies believe that the economic situation will remain the same.
