Profile: Sanmina-SCI Corporation (SANM.O)

Sanmina-SCI Corporation, incorporated in May 1989, is an independent global provider of customized, integrated electronics manufacturing services (EMS). The Company provides these services primarily to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), in the communications, enterprise computing and storage, multimedia, industrial and semiconductor capital equipment, defense and aerospace, medical, renewable energy and automotive industries. The Company’s services include product design and engineering, including initial development, detailed design, prototyping, validation, preproduction services and manufacturing design release; manufacturing of components, subassemblies and complete systems; final system assembly and test; direct order fulfillment and logistics services, and after-market product service and support. The Company manufactures products in 18 countries on five continents.

Product Design and Engineering

The Company's design and engineering group provides customers with design and engineering services for initial product design, detailed product development to production. The Company provides initial product development and detailed product design and engineering services for products, such as communications base stations, optical switches and modules, network switches and routers, computer server and storage products, and medical devices. The Company provides a range of design and engineering services to customers to complement their initial product development efforts. It provides software development support for product development, including installing operating systems on hardware platforms, developing software drivers for electronic devices and developing diagnostic, production test and support software. The Company designs components that are incorporated into its customers’ products, including printed circuit boards, backplanes, enclosures and cables assemblies.

The Company also provides early-stage test development during the prototype phase. It evaluates prototypes to determine if they will meet safety and other standards, such as standards published by Underwriters Laboratories, an independent product safety testing and certification organization and other similar domestic and international organizations. The Company also typically provides low-volume manufacturing to satisfy its customers’ initial needs. It reviews the material and component content of its customers’ designs with a view to designing in alternative components.

Component Technology Design Services

The Company provides design and technology support for its vertically integrated system components and subassemblies. It supports its customers with printed circuit board and backplane design and development assistance for optimizing performance, manufacturability and cost factors critical to overall system performance. These printed circuit boards and backplanes incorporate high layer counts and large form factors and are used in complex products, such as optical networking products and communications switches. These designs also incorporate component miniaturization technologies and other advanced technologies that increase the number and density of components that can be placed on a printed circuit board. These technologies enable OEMs to provide functionality in smaller products. The Company also provides signal integrity engineering services, which enable the transmission of high speed electrical signals through a system while maintaining signal quality and data integrity.

The Company’s mechanical design groups design and engineer a variety of electro-mechanical systems for the communications, enterprise computing and storage, multimedia, industrial and semiconductor, defense and aerospace, medical and renewable energy markets. The Company’s designers address structural, thermal, environmental, seismic, power distribution, and interconnect or cabling, and, regulatory compliance or certification requirements for the product and its application environment. In addition to providing conceptual and detailed mechanical design, its offerings include engineering analysis, design for manufacturability and assembly (DFMA), value engineering, project management, engineering documentation and qualification. Analysis capabilities cover thermal analysis and testing, stress and vibration analysis, dimensional and tolerance analysis and EMC/EMI analysis. Product designs can involve a variety of materials, such as steel, aluminum alloys, injection molded plastics and die-castings. Its design experience covers a range of products, including indoor and outdoor wireless base station cabinets, datacom and computing racks, chassis, frames, enclosures for high-end servers, data storage systems, industrial and medical imaging systems, gaming consoles and gas analysis instrumentation.

Manufacturing

The Company’s manufacturing services includes its vertically integrated manufacturing services. Printed circuit board assembly involves attaching electronic components, such as integrated circuits, capacitors, microprocessors, resistors and memory modules to printed circuit boards. The Company designs and manufactures a range of high-speed data, radio frequency and fiber optic cabling products. Cable assemblies that it manufactures are often used in large rack systems to interconnect subsystems and modules. Its service offerings for optical communications customers are designed to deliver end-to-end solutions with special focus on system design and industrialization, optical component and module assembly, as well as optical test and integration. The Company designs, develops and manufactures a variety of modular solutions, including standard and custom processor modules, flash memory modules and dynamic random access memory device (DRAM) modules. In addition, it supplies solutions to increase memory component density using its advanced semiconductor packaging solutions. The Company offers advanced NexMod memory modules that contain multiple Rambus RDRAM memory layers vertically stacked and mounted to a printed circuit board. NexMod solutions are tailored to high-performance networking customers requiring high bandwidth and low latency in volumetric restrictive system environments. It also provides DDRI, DDRII, and DDRIII DRAM modules utilizing stacked Chip-Scale-Packaging (CSP) technology, Ram-Stack, offering high densities in ultra small form factors. It integrates both standard and custom modules in the products it manufactures.

Final System Assembly and Test

The Company provides final system assembly and test in which assemblies and modules are combined to form complete, finished products. It often integrates printed circuit board assemblies manufactured by the Company with enclosures, cables and memory modules that it also produces. Its final assembly activities also may involve integrating components and modules that others manufacture. The complex, finished products that the Company produces typically require test protocols. The Company’s test services include both functional and environmental tests. It also tests products for conformity to applicable industry, product integrity and regulatory standards. Its test engineering expertise enables it to design functional test processes that assess critical performance elements, including hardware, software and reliability. Products for which the Company provides final system assembly and test include wireless base stations, wireline communications switches, optical networking products and high-end servers.

Direct Order Fulfillment

The Company provides direct order fulfillment for its OEM customers. Direct order fulfillment involves receiving customer orders, configuring products to quickly fill the orders and delivering the products either to the OEM, a distribution channel, such as a retail outlet, or directly to the end customer. The Company manages its direct order fulfillment processes using a core set of common systems and processes that receive order information from the customer and provides supply chain management, including procurement and production planning. These systems and processes enable it to process orders for multiple system configurations and varying production quantities, including single units. The Company direct order fulfillment services include BTO and CTO capabilities. BTO involves building a system having the particular configuration ordered by the OEM customer. CTO involves configuring systems to an end customer’s order. The end customer typically places this order by choosing from a variety of possible system configurations and options. The Company supports its direct order fulfillment services with logistics that include delivery of parts and assemblies to the final assembly site, distribution and shipment of finished systems and processing of customer returns. Its systems are sufficiently flexible to support direct order fulfillment for a variety of different products, such as servers, workstations, set-top boxes, medical devices, scanners, printers and monitors.

The Company competes with Celestica, Inc., Flextronics International Ltd., Hon Hai (Foxconn), and Jabil Circuit, Inc.