Several PCB board manufacturers recently issued price increases

After 2022, the PCB industry continued to release positive signals, especially when several securities firms issued reports pointing out that the prices of the three major raw materials of copper-clad laminate gradually fluctuated and stabilized, and the increase of plate prices also slowed down, and the profitability of the PCB industry is expected to improve.
This breathes a sigh of relief to PCB manufacturers that have been suppressed for a long time by rising raw materials prices.
However, the prospects are not long, due to geopolitical factors, the outbreak of the epidemic, and other reasons, leading to the upstream raw material prices rise again, logistics, labor costs, and other costs continue to increase, recently a wave of upstream PCB plate manufacturers issued a price increase notice again.
On March 3, 2022, Changchun issued a price adjustment letter informing us that due to the recent high or continuous rise of all raw materials of CCL, together with the continuous rise of costs such as Utility, logistics, and labor, the company’s production costs continue to rise, causing losses to continue to expand, in order to alleviate operating pressure, adjust product prices to cope with:
In addition, Gaosenjian Electronics, Baikira Technologies, Oriwan, Ultra-Weiwei Electronics, and Yuxin Electronics also issued price rises notice on March 7, indicating that due to recent price rises of raw materials such as resin, aluminum sheet, copper foil, etc., the price rises of their respective aluminum-based copper clad sheets, PP-aluminium sheets, aluminum sheets, etc. are basically the same, with a range of increase of +5 yuan/square.
Not only in the field of PCB board but also in the field of the chemical industry, the rising price “fire” is burning fiercely. According to the report of Paint Purchase Network, in the past week, the prices of more than 20 kinds of chemical products have risen, up to 15,000 yuan/ton, and some chemical products have increased by nearly 20%.
Experts point out that the current situation in Russia and Ukraine is still not easing, the oil price rise may not end and is gradually rising by $140 per barrel. Morgan Chase also indicated that Brent crude oil could reach $185 per barrel by the end of this year, while some hedge funds are targeting $200. Many sequelae, as well as in the context of the energy crisis, supply constraints, and soaring prices of raw materials will also promote chemical enterprises to start re-planning product pricing, chemical enterprises’ collective letters will become normal.
In this context, upstream PCB-related manufacturers closely related to chemical products are also under pressure.
However, our reporter also noticed that there are many large-scale expansion projects of copper foil at present. The total capacity of existing lithium-electric copper foil produced by Norde and Jiayuan Technologies, two major domestic copper foil enterprises, is 69,000 tons/year. The expansion projects started include Qinghai Lithium-Electric Copper Foil Project Phase II/III, Huizhou Lithium-Electric Copper Foil Project, Ningde Lithium-Electric Copper Foil Project, and Chaohua Technologies also joined the expansion team. After Yulin invests 12.2 billion yuan to expand its capacity of 100,000 tons of copper foil and the gap between supply and demand shrinks, it is expected that the price of copper foil will effectively pull down, which will be a positive factor for maintaining the price stability of copper-clad plates.
The PCB demand in new energy automobiles, 5G communications, the Internet of Things, and other emerging areas has increased significantly, which also boosts the confidence of the PCB industry.
Hope the industry is as warm as this spring, with bright sunshine and flourishing flowers.