From double-sided boards into multilayer (1980)

Equipment decides the range of orders you can take

For a printed wiring board company, layer count is not a grade of quality but the very range of work it can accept. Drawings for equipment that routes wiring through inner layers never reach a plant that can only make double-sided boards. In 1980, with orders for game boards still rising, Meiko Denshi Kogyo bought a machine for layers no one had yet ordered. It can be read not as a forecast that demand for double-sided boards would hold, but as a decision to widen, by its own hand, the kinds of drawings that would arrive.

The same choice repeated afterwards. The build-up building of 1997, the new Miyagi block in 2005, and in recent years high-layer-count boards for AI servers — each time the investment went to a layer that was not yet the mainstay. That what remained when the strong yen of 1985 erased its orders was a read on automotive as the next application shows the same disposition. A company that holds the equipment first keeps room to recover from the product-mix side whenever the market turns.