Tecbridge Circuits

Christmas Newsletter 2010

		We would like to thank you most sincerely for your custom, encouragement and support during 2010. This has been our most successful year yet and has seen us expand both in the UK and throughout Europe. During the year we have attracted new customers in Germany, Italy, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Portugal, Finland, Romania, Denmark, Corsica and the USA. We have achieved rapid growth especially in the Education, Aerospace, Security, Audio and Broadcast markets and we are proud to have worked successfully with countless small businesses in many other vertical markets.

Christmas and New Year Opening

Scoat and Fairfield factories will both operate normally through Christmas without a break. Both factories will close briefly at new year between 1st and 3rd January. Courier services from our two factories in China will be disrupted owing to Christmas and New Year holidays in Western Europe. We will try to receive and ship PCB's in the windows between 29th and 31st December, however performance of courier companies is uncertain at these times.

Here at Tecbridge we will operate as normal up to and including Friday 24th December (Christmas Eve) and will then operate intermittently until Wednesday December 29th.

It is a great idea to order PCB's just before Christmas so they are being manufactured whilst you enjoy the Christmas festivities. It is also a good idea to avoid the rush just before the start of the Chinese New Year holiday.

Chinese New Year Holidays 2011

Much of the World's PCB manufacture is carried out in China and delivery timescales are likely to become extended for both European and Offshore factories alike.

According to the Chinese zodiac, this is the year of the Rabbit and our colleagues at both our offshore factories will be taking a well earned break. The public holiday is between February 2nd and February 8th and both factories will close between 30th January and 10th February inclusive. Orders which have not been shipped before 30th January are likely to be delayed by about 12 days. It would obviously be prudent to allow extra time in the period running up to the Chinese New Year and also to allow extra time when the factories re-open. Both periods are likely to be exceptionally busy and it is not unknown for delays in cold-starting the factories after the shut down.

At Tecbridge Circuits we are taking advantage of the closedown to undertake essential IT and software infrastructure upgrades and improving our processes and procedures. We will however continue to provide technical support and advice over this period, and we will continue to monitor emails, customers file uploads and of course be available by telephone. We will continue to process customers orders and generate quotations.

The Scoat factory at Shijiazhuang processes single and double sided PCB's at low cost but on somewhat long lead times. The local government there has recently imposed rolling power cuts in an endeavor to meet national targets for electricity consumption. Our Fairfield factory in Shenzhen factory handles all other boards including fast turnaround and complex multilayer designs. Single and double sided boards made by Fairfield are slightly more expensive both for tooling cost and also carry higher minimum order charges. Nevertheless, they offer incredible value for single, double sided and multilayer boards.

VAT Increase on January 4th 2011

VAT rises to 20% on January 4th. This is not a big issue for VAT registered customers but may be a significant issue for small businesses and private customers who are not VAT registered.

We can legally charge only 17.5% if we invoice you with a "tax point" before January 4th. The tax point is the earlier of the date we ship your order and raise your invoice, or the date on which you pay for your order. For both account and cash customers who are not registered for VAT, you may wish to pay early to avoid suffering the 20% rate.

In all circumstances, we will charge VAT at 20% if we ship orders after January 4th without pre-payment having been received.

Our Business Values

We aim to supply our customers with the highest possible standards of product quality and service at the lowest possible cost.

We always source PCB products from factories with which we have established deep and close working relationships so we know we can always guarantee quality. We constantly work to improve our understanding of our manufacturing partner's processes and capabilities and learn how to communicate accurately and effectively with them. We always pre-process our customers designs to highlight and anticipate possible issues before they cause problems at the factory or deliver surprises to our customers and to ensure they are presented to the factory in a consistent way. In this way we are able to delivery the best quality and price offshore manufacturing can offer whilst reducing the risk and hassles of working with offshore factories to negligible proportions.

Occasionally we may need to source manufacturing capacity from new factories to meet special technical requirements our core manufacturing partners cannot meet. In these circumstances, we always discuss the issues so our customers can properly evaluate the risks and benefits of working with us and a new but untried manufacturing resource to achieve a design objective.

We are practical electronic design engineers and understand not only bare PCB manufacturing but also PCB design issues such as designing for EMC, critical mixed signal design, power systems design etc. By looking at our customers designs critically we are often able to offer suggestions and advice which save unnecessary design spins which waste time and money.

Why not link to us?

We spend a lot of money on advertising each year and frankly we would prefer not to. You may be able to help us keep our costs and prices low by helping us achieve a higher 'natural' ranking with key search engines.

If you have a blog or web site, contribute to forums, bulletin boards or even social networking sites visible to the major search engines, you can help by linking to us. All you need to do is mention the words PCB or Printed Circuit Board in your anchor text and include a hyperlink to our home page. If you value the experience you have had working with Tecbridge, a nice comment or two is always appreciated.

Why do we not offer a reciprocal link service to our customers? Well, if you want to be inundated with spam cold calls from offshore companies trying to sell to you (like we do) we would be happy to oblige!

If you would like to link to us but you are unsure of the technicalities, please just give us a call.

 

 

Thank you for taking the time to read this newsletter. We wish you a very happy Christmas and prosperous New Year.

 

Henry Gibson

Director
Tecbridge Ltd