The region of Brno and its surrounding has been an incubator of top engineering since the days of Austria-Hungary. After all, names like Viktor Kaplan, Kurt Gödel, Georg Placzek, and Ernst Mach are still considered legends in their fields. For many decades, the Moravian metropolis has been hosting trade fairs. The local Technical University in Brno has become the largest technical university in the country in recent years. These are the foundations of the #brnoregion, an area with interesting innovation potential, which is known far beyond the borders of the region.
Three companies could also tell their stories about it, which are united by their focus on the field of high-end electronics and the region of their seat. The Boskovice company Gatema, the PCBA manufacturer Safiral, and the Brno specialists for development electronics – Consilia. All these companies have a significant part of their customers from abroad. They share their know-how and use each other's services in the development and production of printed circuit boards within the region whenever possible.
The advantages are obvious: the sophisticated and demanding printed circuit boards that Consilia designs need to be tested in practice in prototype production that is fast and flexible. And that is what the two companies focus on, which unites not only the district but also the personalities who lead the companies. After all, Gatema's business started once in Kunštát. And Martin Lepka, today's CEO of Safiral, spent part of his career in Gatema for a change.
But back to PCB development and assembly. In recent decades, it has come to be taken for granted that every larger or more demanding production goes to Asia. Asian production was crushing European companies with competitive prices and the ability to produce high-volume numbers of boards. Therefore, both Gatema and Safiral had to focus on other types of orders and customers. Instead of quantity, focus mainly on quality, prototype production, and speed of delivery. Recent years have proven that such a strategy can work.
Already during the COVID pandemic, we had the opportunity to see for ourselves what a perfectly globalized market can mean in practice. In our industry, this meant several crises at once - everything started with the lockdown, followed by an extreme raw material crisis, plus complications with logistics. After all, we've all had the opportunity to note how huge a supply problem a single overturned ship in the Suez Canal can cause. Therefore, European companies often started looking for local partners.
Stanislav Sehnal, COO of Safiral, completes it. "We are convinced that if we focus on express speed and sophisticated boards, as well as a desire to invest, work on ourselves, and be there for partners beyond normal working hours, it is possible to build and develop a successful production company in this region as well. Today, customers often look for us on their own, which we appreciate a lot," he says. And the numbers prove his words. Three years ago, 22 people worked at Safiral. Today, the number has tripled - which is also why the company plans to move its production to the industrial zone in nearby Letovice instead of Kunštát.
Both manufacturers are traditional suppliers to large companies from Brno, which has long managed to attract the most important technical corporations to the city - companies such as Honeywell, Thermo Fischer, ABB, and many others are based here. After all, it was Honeywell that recently received a grant. It is developing a top R&D center for the whole of Europe in Brno and is currently attracting hundreds of new developers. In addition, however, there are also many smaller companies that, instead of mass production, develop unique electronics for the most demanding customers from the fields of aerospace, automotive, medicine, or the military industry. Such as Consilia, a company that will celebrate 20 years on the market this year.
When we started, we had doubts about whether we stood a chance of succeeding as a company solely focused on development services. After all, many companies view investments in development as costly and uncertain. On the other hand, mass production is predictable, and margins can be planned much more easily. However, we built our business model precisely on developing products that others find very complicated. Often, they contain some of the most demanding boards out there. We have demonstrated that we can design them in top quality, and today we have a wide portfolio of customers not only from the Czech Republic but also from abroad, often from German-speaking countries.
Having a partner who can produce them within the region is ideal for exactly such boards. Logistics and communication are easier, but also a quantity that is difficult to express in numbers. Relations. "I'm always happy when an order comes from Consilio. I know that it will be a challenge and that we too will have to think about how to make high-end boards correctly. On the other hand, I also know that the result will be a reference for us as well and that I can rely on the absolute professionalism and determination of the entire team that works at Consilia. In recent years, we have successfully passed several difficult examinations together and know what we can expect from each other. And the fact that we continue to cooperate on larger projects only proves that we can do it," concludes Stanislav Sehnal from Safiral.