AT&S OPTS FOR PAL LINE FOR NEW PLANT IN CHINA

Looking good. The AT&S machine.

The Austrian company AT&S (Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik AG) is currently building its first production site in China. It is at this new €145 million plant in Shanghai that a newly ordered PAL Nickel and Gold line is being installed. Commissioning will take place in November in good time to meet AT&S’s schedule for the first HDI-Microvia circuit boards to leave the new plant by the end of the year.

The PAL line will feature a basket load station to allow for ergonomic loading and unloading of panels from baskets, a laser positioning system, and OSSTjwin software with Chinese screens.

“Naturally we were delighted to have won this important order,” says Geoff Paterson, Managing Director of PAL. “We bring to the equation not only our technological expertise in the knowledge that AT&S is strongly committed to growth and on-going technological development; but also another element we know is of vital importance to them – the very best of customer support.

“We have invested heavily to ensure we give all our China-based customers superb after-sales service. We have three service centres in the Shanghai/Suzhou area with engineers available on a 24-hour call out service. Our local engineers and technicians will be heavily involved in the installation and testing of the new machine so will have a complete knowledge of it. Their expertise is backed up by a comprehensive stock of spare parts held locally with notime-consuming import procedures needed. Similar set-ups have been established in the Shenzhen and Huizhou area (Southern China) as well as Beijing (Northern China). We are proud to say that in China, PAL is not only providing customers with a technical service for their PAL equipment, but also the all-important ‘local knowledge’ wherever they are in China”

“We are looking forward to working together with PAL at our new plant in China,” says AT&S spokesperson Reinhold Oblak. “It’s extremely important for AT&S to have excellent partners on both sides – on the customer side as well as on the supplier side.”

Kenneth Wong, PAL’s Regional Manager for Europe explains how strongly PAL is supporting Western companies like AT&S in their move to China. “Nowadays, everybody says ‘if your customers go there, you have to follow’. However in PAL, we are obviously not only ‘following’, we are there already. This important order proves just how right we have been in making a major investment in local service centres in China. It is very definitely the right way to go and gives customers, particularly Western companies like AT&S, confidence that they will not be alone with their machine in a far eastern country! While those of us based at PAL headquarters in Hong Kong will continue to liaise with AT&S’s head office and key personnel transferred from there to China, our highly trained engineers based at our service centres in China come into their own when training and working with their local counterparts at the factory – not least of all they will, of course, be using the local dialects understood by the workforce. We are looking forward to establishing a long term partnership with AT&S and supporting their growth in China as well as worldwide.”

Almost one in four mobile phones in Europe is already fitted with a printed circuit board produced by AT&S, and leading telecommunications companies such as Nokia, Siemens, Motorola, Ericsson, and RIM are amongst its major customers. More on ATS from www.ats.net