This September, 2009, UniSmart Holding Limited, a holding company under Unimicron group, has jointly invested in RUWEL International GmbH (“RUWEL”), a PCB supplier in Germany, with a financial investor, BlueBay. Currently, Unimicron indirectly holds around 35% of total RUWEL shares.
RUWEL has taken over the former production plant in Geldern from the RUWEL GmbH. RUWEL GmbH is a PCB supplier located in Germany with long history and used to be the third largest PCB manufacturer in Europe. RUWEL GmbH, as a leading European manufacturer of automotive PCB, focused on automotive and industrial PCB products and its total sales revenues in 2008 of the Geldern plant were EUR 49 million.
According to Prismark’s research, the automotive PCB market represents 4.4% of the overall PCB market and the estimated CAGR will be around 6.6% from 2008 to 2013. Given a rising technology migration in automotive PCB, the electronic content in cars will continue to increase. Additionally, the automotive PCB market is more stable compared to other consumer PCB applications. With the supply-chain shifting to Asia, there will be a tremendous potential for the automotive PCB market in Mainland China. In additional to the stable market demands, the characteristic of automotive PCB includes, among others, higher entry barrier in term of quality and technology requirement and longer qualification procedure.
Based on the above understandings of the automotive PCB market, Unimicron and BlueBay expect, through this cooperation, to integrate the capacity of Unimicron in Asia with the leading process capability and the strong customer relationships of RUWEL so as to expedite the enhancement of the competitiveness in the automotive PCB business and to offer the better products, service and technology to the global customers.

Financial Dep. IR
Oct. 22th, 2009