TAOYUAN, TAIWAN – The Taiwanese PCB industry grew 9.6% year-over-year in the third quarter, reaching NT227.1 billion ($7 billion), according to the Taiwan Printed Circuit Association.
The association said the quarter was mainly driven by the peak season effect, the mild recovery of mainstream terminal products, as well as the specification upgrades of AI infrastructure (such as servers and network communication equipment) and the boost from the low-orbit satellite market.
Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, affected by the lower-than-expected sales of Apple mobile phones and the uncertainty of the international situation, there is a strong wait-and-see sentiment in the market, TPCA said. Terminal and downstream enterprises remain conservative in stocking, and the overall growth momentum is restricted. It is expected that the global output value of Taiwanese enterprises in the fourth quarter will reach NT$209 billion ($6.4 billion), a slight decline of 1.2% compared with the same period last year. However, the estimated total output value in 2024 will still reach NT$808.3 billion ($24.8 billion), an increase of 5.0% compared with last year.
Overall, the global production scale of circuit boards of Taiwanese enterprises will continue to expand at a growth rate of 5.7% in 2025, with a total output value reaching NT$854.1 billion ($26.2 billion).
For the quarter, the scale of the application market of Taiwanese PCB was mainly distributed among communications (37%), computers (21.8%), semiconductors (17.7%), automobiles (11.4%), consumer electronics (8%) and others (4.1%). Among them, the semiconductor sector witnessed the most prominent growth, driven by the demand for AI chips and high-bandwidth memory HBM. The output value of communication products continued to increase due to the demand for network communication products extended by low-orbit satellites and AI servers. Although the sales in the PC market were lower than expected, the demand for AI servers and general servers supported the growth of the output value in the computer application category. Affected by the rapid inventory replenishment in the previous two years, combined with weakened demand and the base effect, the growth momentum of the automobile industry weakened quarter by quarter. Meanwhile, as consumer spending has not yet increased significantly, the performance of consumer products remained sluggish.
In terms of PCB products, multilayer boards (30.1%), flexible boards (24.3%), HDI boards (19.6%) and IC substrates (17.7%) accounted for a relatively large proportion. Among them, the demand for IC substrates remained strong, the same as in the above semiconductor applications. Driven by the demand for servers, ADAS for high-frequency applications and low-orbit satellites, HDI boards also showed good growth. Multilayer boards still took AI as the main growth engine, and the network communication products required for the extension of infrastructure drove the growth of the specifications and demand for multilayer boards due to the upgrading of the architecture or the increase in usage. In contrast, the performance of flexible boards was relatively weak in this quarter.
