The PCB industry is experiencing a surge! After missing out on Dazhu and Xinqi, don’t miss the leading AIPCB testing equipment manufacturer, Sitaike.
The explosive demand for AI overseas is driving the entire PCB industry chain to take off. Beneficial segments are continuously spreading upstream to equipment and materials. Currently, the SPI segment remains untapped. AIPCB is driving the technological upgrade of high-end PCBs such as advanced HDI boards and semiconductor packaging substrates, which places higher demands on SPI equipment. The demand for high-end SPI equipment is growing exponentially.
With the first beta, the iteration of AI chip technology requires PCB pad spacing to be reduced to below 20μm, pushing the precision of high-end SPI from 5μm to 3μm, leading to a surge in equipment upgrade demands.
With the second beta, Microsoft and Meta’s financial reports exceeded expectations, and the real explosion of overseas AI demand continues to drive AI hardware orders. NVIDIA’s GPU board production capacity still needs to be rapidly expanded, increasing high-end SPI procurement by 200%; cloud providers like Meta and Amazon are also expanding ASIC server production beyond expectations.
Therefore, in the high-end SPI segment of PCBs, the growth rate of demand is more elastic than that of servers and PCBs, indicating a second derivative, where the demand for expansion is compounded by the need for equipment upgrades.
PCBs used in AI servers and data centers are generally high-layer boards with more than 24 layers (for example, NVIDIA’s GB200 GPU board uses 6-stage 24-layer HDI), with solder paste printing precision requirements reaching ±5μm, far exceeding the ±30μm standard for consumer electronics. These PCBs must pass 100% of 3DSPI inspections, with the value of testing equipment for a single AI server’s supporting PCB being approximately 800,000 to 1.5 million yuan. Sitaike’s domestic equipment is 40% cheaper, priced at 500,000 to 900,000 yuan. In 2024, the global AIPCB market will see a penetration rate of 72% for high-end SPI equipment (compared to only 53% for traditional consumer electronics), with leading server OEMs like Foxconn and Luxshare Precision. The domestic AIPCB high-end SPI equipment stock is 2,800 units, accounting for 35% of the global total installed capacity.
Sitaike, the true leader in high-end SPI equipment, has core clients including Foxconn, Luxshare, and Shenghong, with a growth rate of 266% entering the Taiwanese market in 2024. Benefiting from AIPCB demand, the company’s performance has rebounded from a continuous decline, showing significant positive growth for two consecutive quarters since Q4 2024. The turning point has emerged, and it has just begun.
After going public in 2023, the company raised funds for capacity expansion, increasing standard capacity from 2,000 to 3,000 units per year, and can flexibly formulate outsourcing processing plans based on order conditions to break through capacity bottlenecks. With full orders, it is expected that all new capacity will be used for high-end SPI equipment production, potentially increasing revenue by 1,000 units * 600,000 yuan per unit = 600 million yuan. With a gross profit margin of 55% and a net profit margin of 30%, this could increase profits by 200 million yuan, plus an additional 100 million yuan from traditional profits, totaling 300 million yuan in net profit, targeting a market value of 10 billion yuan. Currently, the market value is only 4 billion yuan, indicating a potential upside of 150%!
This is for reference only and should not be considered as investment advice.