Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs for short), which mainly provide electrical connections for electronic components, are also called “the mother of electronic system products.” From the perspective of the industrial chain, PCBs are mainly used in communication equipment, computers and peripherals, consumer electronics, automotive electronics, national defense and military industry and other electronic equipment fields. With the development and maturity of new-generation information technologies such as cloud computing, 5G, and AI, global data traffic will continue to show a high growth trend. Under the explosive growth of data volume and the trend of data cloud transfer, the server PCB industry has very broad development prospects.
Industry size overview
According to IDC statistics, global server shipments and sales have steadily increased from 2014 to 2019. In 2018, the industry’s prosperity was relatively high. Shipments and shipments reached 11.79 million units and 88.816 billion U.S. dollars, a year-on-year increase of 15.82 % And 32.77%, showing both volume and price increases. The growth rate in 2019 was relatively slow, but it was still at a historical high. From 2014 to 2019, China’s server industry developed rapidly, and the growth rate exceeded that of the rest of the world. In 2019, shipments fell relatively, but the sales amount increased year-on-year, the internal structure of the product changed, the average unit price increased, and the proportion of high-end server sales showed a rising trend.
2. Comparison of major server companies According to the latest survey data released by IDC, independent design companies in the global server market will still occupy a major share in Q2 2020. The top five sales are HPE/Xinhuasan, Dell, Inspur, IBM, and Lenovo, with market share They are 14.9%, 13.9%, 10.5%, 6.1%, 6.0%. In addition, ODM vendors accounted for 28.8% of the market share, an increase of 63.4% year-on-year, and they have become the main choice of server processing for small and medium-sized cloud computing companies.
In 2020, the global market will be affected by the new crown epidemic, and the global economic downturn will be relatively obvious. Companies mostly adopt online/cloud office models and still maintain a high demand for servers. Q1 and Q2 have maintained a higher growth rate than other industries, but Still lower than the data of the same period of previous years. According to a survey by DRAMeXchange, global server demand in the second quarter was driven by data center demand. North American cloud companies were the most active. In particular, the demand for orders suppressed under the turmoil in Sino-US relations last year showed a clear tendency to replenish inventory in the first quarter of this year, resulting in an increase in servers in the first half The speed is relatively strong.
The top five vendors in China’s server market sales in Q1 2020 are Inspur, H3C, Huawei, Dell, and Lenovo, with market shares of 37.6%, 15.5%, 14.9%, 10.1% and 7.2%, respectively. The overall market shipments Basically remained stable, and sales maintained steady growth. On the one hand, the domestic economy is recovering rapidly, and the new infrastructure plan is gradually launched in the second quarter, and there is greater demand for infrastructure such as servers; on the other hand, the demand for ultra-large-scale customers has increased significantly. For example, Alibaba benefited from the new retail business Hema Season 618 The shopping festival, the ByteDance system, Douyin, etc., are growing rapidly, and domestic server demand is expected to maintain rapid growth in the next five years.
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Development of server PCB industry
The continuous growth of server demand and the development of structural upgrades will drive the entire server industry into an upward cycle. As a key material for carrying server operations, PCB has a broad prospect of increasing both volume and price under the dual drive of server cycle upward and platform upgrade development.
From the perspective of material structure, the main components involved in the PCB board in the server include CPU, memory, hard disk, hard disk backplane, etc. The PCB boards used are mainly 8-16 layers, 6 layers, package substrates, 18 layers or more, 4 layers, and soft boards. With the transformation and development of the overall digital structure of the server in the future, PCB boards will show the main trend of high-level numbers. -18-layer boards, 12-14-layer boards, and 12-18-layer boards will be the mainstream materials for server PCB boards in the future.
From the perspective of the industry structure, the main suppliers of the server PCB industry are Taiwanese and mainland manufacturers. The top three are Taiwan Golden Electronics, Taiwan Tripod Technology and China Guanghe Technology. Guanghe Technology is the number one server PCB in China. supplier. Taiwanese manufacturers mainly focus on the ODM server supply chain, while mainland companies focus on the brand server supply chain. ODM vendors mainly refer to white-brand server vendors. Cloud computing companies put forward server configuration requirements to ODM vendors, and ODM vendors purchase PCB boards from their PCB vendors to complete hardware design and assembly. ODM vendors account for 28.8% of the global server market sales, and they have become the mainstream form of supply of small and medium-sized servers. The mainland server is mainly supplied by brand manufacturers (Inspur, Huawei, Xinhua III, etc.). Driven by 5G, new infrastructure, and cloud computing, domestic replacement demand is very strong.
In recent years, the revenue and profit growth of mainland manufacturers have been significantly higher than those of Taiwanese manufacturers, and their catching-up efforts are very strong. With the development of new technologies, brand servers are expected to continue to expand their market share. The domestic brand server supply chain model Mainland manufacturers are expected to continue to maintain high growth momentum. Another key point is that the overall R&D expenses of mainland companies are increasing year by year, far exceeding the investment of Taiwanese manufacturers. In the context of rapid global technological change, mainland manufacturers are more hopeful to break through technical barriers and seize market share under new technologies.
In the future, with the development and maturity of new-generation information technologies such as cloud computing, 5G, and AI, global data traffic will continue to show a high growth trend, and global server equipment and services will continue to maintain high demand. As an important material for servers, PCB is expected to continue to maintain rapid growth in the future, especially the domestic server PCB industry, which has very broad development prospects under the background of economic structural transformation and upgrading and localization substitution.