What is the potential of FPC industry

In the past decade, China’s electronic information industry has developed rapidly and the scale of the industry has been expanding. China has become the world’s largest consumer electronics market, and the upstream and downstream industrial chains fully match the needs of the PCB industry. Mobile electronic products, such as smart phones, are booming. The emerging consumer electronic products market, such as wearable smart devices and unmanned aerial vehicles, is also growing rapidly. The trend of equipment miniaturization and miniaturization is becoming more and more obvious. The traditional PCB can no longer meet the requirements of products. Therefore, major manufacturers have begun to research new technologies to replace PCB. FPC, as the most popular technology, is becoming the main connecting component of electronic devices.

FPC is the fastest growing sub industry in PCB. FPC is a kind of printed circuit board with high reliability and flexibility. It is made of flexible copper laminate, which is used to connect the base plate of electronic parts, and is also the medium of electronic product signal transmission.

As an important category of PCB, FPC has the advantages of high wiring density, light weight, thin thickness, folding, bending resistance, high temperature resistance, 3D wiring, etc. It is more in line with the development trend of intelligent portable electronic products in the downstream industry and will be widely used.

FPC has obvious advantages in smart phone display module, touch module, fingerprint identification module, side key, power key, etc. The new iPhone uses about 14-16 FPCs and other PCB materials, accounting for a total cost of $15. Huawei, Oupu, Outi and other domestic mobile phone manufacturers have also increased the use of FPC in high-end flagship computers. At present, the number of FPCs is about 10-12, and it is expected that the future consumption will continue to increase under the high-end trend.

Although the growth rate of the mobile phone market has slowed down, the domestic smartphone market share continues to rise, with the collective breakthrough of HOV and Xiaomi, Samsung’s market share continues to decline, and Apple’s share has suffered a bottleneck and withstood the impact of the wave. It is expected that the rise of domestic mobile phone manufacturers will bring explosive growth in the field of flexible mobile phones to FPC.

With the rise of the global wearable device market, large international electronic device manufacturers such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung and Sony have increased their investment and R&D efforts in wearable devices. Other industry leaders of domestic enterprises such as Baidu, Tencent, Qihoo 360 and Xiaomi have also launched wearable devices. The performance characteristics of FPC meet the requirements of wearable devices and become the first choice of wearable devices. Therefore, the rapid development of new terminal products such as wearable devices will continue to expand the application field of FPC.

FPC’s unique characteristics meet various R&D needs, which will determine the huge potential of FPC market in the future.