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Flex Ltd

Flex Ltd – An American-Singaporean Multinational Conglomerate Famous For Its Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS)

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The 51-years old company Flex Ltd offers electronics manufacturing services (EMS) and it is also an original design manufacturer (ODM). Joe McKenzie and Barbara Ann McKenzie founded the company in September of 1969. The company was previously known as Flextronics International Ltd and the company is currently based in San Jose, California. Simplicity and efficiency are the two key factors that Flex provides to its customers and help them grow in this competitive market. In 2019, Flex completed its journey of five decades in the electronics industry and also appointed Ms. Revathi Advaithi as its new CEO.

Flex Ltd – A Family Business

During the late 1960s, the silicon valley companies needed more printed circuit boards than they were able to produce in-house. So, Joe and Barbara McKinzie opened a family business called Flextronics where they hand-soldered every part on the circuit boards. Eventually, they automated the board construction, and the business growing in the 1970s. In 1980, the couple sold the company to Jack Watts, Joe Sullivan, and Bob Todd. After this acquisition, the company was converted to a contract manufacturer, and the next year it became the first American manufacturer that went offshore and established business in Singapore.

In the 1980s, the company expanded its solutions and started providing computer-aided design services (CAD), blueprinting printed circuit boards along designing. As Flextronics expanded its product range, it started landing big clients like Sun Microsystems. As the business boomed, the company started building facilities all over Asia but loss started escalating as the economic recession in the early 90s hit hard.

Flex Ltd
Image source: dev.rodpub.com

Surviving The Economic Depression

Flextronics went public just a few weeks before the stock market crashed and the economic recession started in the early 1990s. In order to survive the crisis, the company privatized all the Asian manufacturing facilities with the help of outside funding and eventually closed the US plants. Michael Marks became the CEO of this new private company which filed its IPO in 1994. Marks was determined to rebuild the company’s presence in the US and under his leadership, the revenue tripled within three years.

Between 1993 to 1998, Flextronics International Ltd completed 12 acquisitions and expanded its workforce by hiring more than 10,000 employees. The company built its industrial parks in the low-cost regions which included Poland, Mexico, Brazil, Hungary, China, and the Czech Republic. This helped the company bring down the logistics and transportation costs. In 1995, Flextronics received a contract from Microsoft and the products were smart home devices and wallet-size PCs. During this period Flextronics acquired companies like nChip, the Astron Group, and FICO Plastics Limited. In 1997, the company built a giant size R&D facility in San Jose, California, and a couple of new plants in China and Mexico.

Partnerships and Acquisitions

The Hungarian market for Flextronics developed as Hewlett-Packard made the company primary manufacturer for inkjet printers. In the mid-1980s, Flextronics acquired a bunch of companies that included Neutronics Holdings A.G., Conexao Informatica Ltd, DTM Products Inc, Energipilot A.B., and Altatron Inc. In 1999, Flextronics entered into a service partnership with Corio Inc and later that year announced the purchase of The Dii Group Inc for $2.4 billion. This acquisition to date is one of the biggest in the history of Flextronics.

In 2000, the company went into a five-year outsourcing contract with Motorola. With the advent of a new decade, the company made it among the top three best-managed companies by IndustryWeek. The series of acquisitions continued in the following years as well and by the end of the decade, it landed another big client which was LG Electronics. In 2015, the company’s name was replaced by Flex from Flextronics International Ltd.

In recent years, Flex acquired some of the very important companies which play a significant role in today’s cutting-edge innovative technology. For example, Flex acquired NEXTracker which is a famous solar tracker company followed by Wink Smart Home Platform for smart AI-based tech in our home.

Revathi Advaithi – CEO of Flex Ltd

Revathi Advaithi became the new CEO of Flex in 2019 and she is also an Advocate for women in STEM. Revathi completed her education at Birla Institute of Technology and Science and graduated with a mechanical engineering degree. In 2005, she completed her MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management. Revathi worked at Eaton and Honeywell before joining Flex.

Sanmina Corporation

Sanmina Corporation – An American Fortune 500 Company providing Electronics Manufacturing Services.

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From the mid-1900s till the end of the 20th century, many companies started their fortune in the semiconductors and telecommunication industry. Most of them became very successful due to the rising demand for technology with the increasing population and change in lifestyle. Sanmina Corporation is one such successful company in the field of electronics manufacturing services. The company was founded in 1980 by Jure Sola. Sanmina provides end-to-end design solutions of premium quality to the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). The company’s main fields of interest are communications network, healthcare, computing and storage, multimedia, defense, aerospace, clean tech sectors, etc.

A Brief Introduction about Sanmina Corporation

Sanmina Technology is based in San Jose, California. Within 40 years of its thriving business, the company has opened nearly 80 manufacturing sites, hired 40,000 employees, operating in more than 20 countries, and has already established itself as a technology leader. In 2018, the company was ranked 411 on the Fortune 500 list. Currently, Jure Sola is serving as the Chairperson and CEO of the company although there was a change in leadership in the meantime. As many big companies are eventually entering into the profitable industry of oil and gas, Sanmina has been a provider of manufacturing services to some big oilfield equipment and service corporations for the last 20 years.

Sanmina Corporation
Image Source: sanmina.com

Founding History of the Company

Jure Sola started working for Lika after graduating which produced electronic transducers and control instruments for factory automation. In 1980, he decided to establish his own company and thus co-founded Sanmina Corporation with Milan Mandaric. When Sola and Mandaric opened the company they exclusively manufactured printed circuit boards. For the first decade, the company expanded the business into manufacturing backplanes and subassemblies. In 1991, Jure Sola became the President and Chairman of the company.

In the 1990s, the company started designing and producing products for major OEM companies and acquired a bunch of businesses. In 1993, the company filed for an IPO and completed it on NASDAQ. In 1997, among the contract manufacturers present at that time, the company ranked ninth. So, Sanmina avoided manufacturing consumer products so that it can focus on high-end networking and telecommunication applications. Sola believed that the company had lots of opportunities if it went after designing and manufacturing products that are difficult to build internally.

Sanmina Corporation and SCI Systems

From the 1990s both the OEM companies and the contract manufacturers started working side by side like integrated cooperation. During this truly cooperative time, SCI became a pioneer in the list of OEM companies as it designed and produced almost everything for the Apollo Space Project. By the end of the 1990s, the company generated most of its revenue from government contracts and personal computers. Jure Sola saw this as an opportunity as it wanted to create a more diversified revenue system for Sanmina Corporation. This meant the company needed to bring a broader group of customers on board which led to the merger of SCI and Sanmina in 2001.

Sanmina Corporation
Image Source: mergr.com

Sanmina generated two-thirds of its revenue from the communication market but it was really depressed during the time of the merger. So, this merger was very crucial for Sanmina Corporation to get back on its feet and emerge as a larger empire in the industry. In July 2001, Sanmina Corporation acquired SCI in a stock swap for $6 billion and it is till date one of the biggest acquisitions in the history of the electronic manufacturing services industry. After the acquisition, the new company started generating an annual revenue of nearly $12 billion and soon it became one of the top 5 companies in the electronics manufacturers industry. In the last few years, Sola’s company acquired a few more businesses and has maintained the quality of services provided.

The Founders: Jure Sola and Milan Mandaric

Jure Sola was born in 1951 in Croatia. He moved to the United States at the age of seventeen and completed his engineering from San Jose State University. After graduating in 1972 Sola joined Lika Corporation and worked there for eight years. In 1980, he co-founded Sanmina Corporation and switched his positions a couple of times.

Milan Mandaric is a Serbian-American businessman who started his career by taking control of his father’s machine shop. In 1969, he left his home country Yogoslavia and started working for an American company in California. Soon he founded his own company, Lika Corporation but after a few years sold it off to co-found Sanmina with Jure Sola.