Traditionally, PCB are used in industries like telecommunications, PC, consumer electronics, automotive, military and medicals. But now, with the rapid development and widely application of cloud compute, 5G and AI, the globa data traffic explosion, while under this trend, the server PCB trade has a ever bright future than before.
Industry Glance
From the number of IDC, the sales number of servers has been steadily increasing during 2014 to 2019 globally. In 2018, sales number was 11.790.000sets and 88.816.000.000 US dollars, increased by 15.82% in sales sets and 32.77% in value.
In China, the server market is increasing with a higher speed than globally during this period. In the year of 2019, the sales sets reduced but its value increase which means the unit price has gone higher.
Global
China
Major Server Company
In Q2 of 2020, the global server market has top five sales companies as below
HPE (14.9%)
DELL (13.9%)
Inspur (10.5%)
IBM (6.1%)
LENOVO (6.0)
Despite of these brands, the ODM companies also occupy a market share of 28.8%, which sees a increase of 63.4% on yearly basis, that is a signal small and middle enterprises tend to adopt use smaller and flexibles servers than before.
Under the impact of COVID-19, the global economy is running down, however due to many companies use cloud office, the server industry still enjoy a good time than others, which we see a relatively high increasing in Q1 and Q2. The market needs typically in North American which shows their cloud office booming, also reflects the regular needing was depressed during the China-US battle in 2019-2020.
In China market, the top five server brands are:
Inspur (37.6%)
HPE (15.5%)
Huiwei (14.9%)
DELL (10.1%)
Lenovo (7.2%)
The whole market is in steady basis with solid increasing. Two obvious factors are the booming of domastic economy and the new construction plan being applied gradually, they require more servers as basic set ups; the others side are the giant companies are benefitted by their sales fly up, such as Alibaba and Dance Byte.
Server PCB Facts
PCB, as the foundamental parts of servers, are benefitted by the blossom of server industry and we see it will enter a cycle flying up both in sales value and quantity.
Let's review a server by parts that are involved with PCBs: CPU, memory, harddisk, etc. The circuits board used are mainly in 8-16layers, packaged substrates, 18layers+ and flexibles. We also see the trend the PCBs in server business will convert to higher layers such as 8-18layers.
The manufacturer side, Taiwanese PCB manufacturers and mainland China PCB manufacturers occupied the server PCB markets. Top three of them are: GCE(TW), Tripod(TW) and Delton(Mainland). We see the differences that China mainland server manufacturers mostly server branded server companies while the Taiwanese mainly offer service to ODM companies. What does that mean? The ODM server company usually do not label their brand, but to specify their configuration requirements to the PCB factories which they received from cloud computing customers and the PCB companies produce PCB accordingly and finish assembly.
During the last few years, the mainland China server PCB manufacturers increasing speed is obviously higher than Taiwanese, thanks to the ever changing era, we can expect mainlaid competitors keep expanding their market shares.