NEVADA CITY, CA – Manufacturing Market Insider (MMI) today announced revenues among the EMS companies the research firm ranks as the 50 largest worldwide declined 5.7% year-over-year in 2023.
The venerable newsletter's annual MMI Top 50 EMS list found that sales fell $26 billion, to $423 billion for the year. The data are based on an annual survey of over 100 of the largest EMS companies worldwide and traditionally not corrected for the calendar year.
Among the top tier firms, Foxconn and Pegatron were the only EMS companies showing declines, however, while Tiers 2 and 3 did well, in many cases exhibiting excellent growth, with more positive results than negative ones. The growth rates of the Top 50 are a proxy for the rest of the industry, MMI said, as a minority of companies suffered a downturn in revenue.
The top 50 companies typically account for approximately 85 to 90% of total industry revenue, MMI said.
While Foxconn has at times singlehandedly grown the industry, its revenue decline in 2023 slowed the total industry growth. Foxconn's sales fell 11.6% and Pegatron dropped 13.6%.
Industry participants cannot expect these industry giants to continue to expand at double-digit rates, as these large numbers are difficult to sustain compared to those of Tier 2–4 suppliers, which have grown rapidly over the past few years due to acquisitions, MMI said. For example, GPV reached the highest growth rate of any EMS company om the list, jumping 81.2% in 2023 and 65.1% percent in 2022. Overall, the APAC region accounted for around 74.7% of the Top 50 EMS revenue, and the Americas represented 22.8% of revenue, an increase of 2.4%, while the EMEA region constituted 2.5%, an increase of 0.3%, mainly due to extensive activity in acquisitions.
It took a minimum of $434 million in sales to make the MMI Top 50, down from $448 million in 2023. For 2023, the top 10 accounted for 88.7% of Top 50 sales, down from 89.1% in 2022, illustrating that the EMS industry remains top-heavy. The aggregate growth of the bottom 40 companies on the list was 12.6%, increasing from $44.5 billion in 2022 to a reported $50.1 billion in 2023.