20 years of evolution – one graph explains it all

The first 10 years

Started as Europrint, right from the beginning, we were active in the market of prototypes and small series. Our goal was to serve our customers with any wish they had: “You name it, we make it”. This requires a rather costly organization and does not leave room for optimization in the business process or in the production process.

The constant decay of PCB prices and the declining appreciation for service “old style” went hand in hand and were accelerated by the disappearance of the layout and board specialist at the customers’ organization. With the disappearance of specialization, the prices collapsed over the years. Leaving a high cost of service for a lower price to kill the margins and finally leading to a loss and the inevitable end.

The next 10 years


Being conscious of the devastating decay of the traditional market we searched for ways to bring down the cost of service. On production level the solution was order pooling. The goal here is to bring more value on a production panel and reduce the cost. Instead of making 1 production panel containing one job of 5 small boards leaving the panel half or more empty, we fill it with other jobs of equal technology. The value rises but the costs stay the same

To achieve this one needs many orders to combine. And these orders need to fit in a predefined standard technology in order to make pooling possible. Selling this to the market required two things: An online communication tool with calculation and order capabilities and a price so attractive that a customer forgets his special wishes.

It worked. In about 5 years most of our traditional market was converted – or lost – but the new emerging market was already bigger than the old one.

The future

In recent years we invested a lot to extend our services aiming for the widest pooling offer in Europe. It is now imperative to stay ahead of competition and offer extra convenience and added value around our services without increasing the cost too much. That way we glue the market to us and can harvest on the result as costs will stay under control.

Most of these new emerging products and services will lie in the field of software tools and eC-assembly-tools that help the customer to practically materialize his design.