TOKYO -- Revenues among Japanese printed circuit board manufacturers fell 17.2% year-over-year in June, continuing a yearlong slump.

Japanese PCB makers produced a total of 1.417 million sq. m of PCBs in June, up 6% from May and down 15.6% from 2010, the Ministry of Economy, Trading and Industry (METI) reported. Revenue rose 8.9% month-over-month to 51.6 billion yen, the first sequential increase since the first quarter.

Year to date revenue through June fell 13.5% to 313.6 billion yen. Volumes were down 10.7% to 8.4 million sq. m.

Last year's PCB revenue increased 15.9%, noted Dominique Numakura, head of DKN Research. "This may seem pretty good, but business tanked during 2008 and carried a downward momentum into 2009. The only direction for business to go was up."

Numakura says damage from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami is not the primary reason for the business slump. Instead, he asserts, the real problem is currency appreciation and a failure to cut capacity. "Japanese circuit board manufacturers lost a bit of their competitive pricing edge because of a recent appreciation of Japanese yen against other currencies including the US dollar and Euro. Their customer base is shopping for the best price and ordering from other companies. This has not deterred the circuit board manufacturers to lower production; in fact, production levels in Taiwan during the first half of the year are at historically high levels."

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