For most of the industry’s history, the electronics manufacturing services (EMS) scorecard was simple: bigger was better. More factories, more SMT lines, more purchasing power. Scale lowered unit costs, and lower unit costs won contracts.
That logic still matters. But the last several years have tested it hard. Component shortages, shifting trade flows, regionalized supply chains, shorter product lifecycles, and sudden demand surges in areas like AI infrastructure and e-mobility have shown that size alone does not guarantee resilience. When conditions change overnight, the question OEMs ask is no longer just “How big is my EMS partner?” but “How quickly can my EMS partner respond?”
The future of EMS may not belong only to the biggest, but to those who adapt best.
To explore what this shift means for OEMs, we sat down with Kanusit Boonrukvanit, Business Development Director at SVI, whose team works with OEMs across Asia, Europe, and North America as they plan their next programs.
Scale is built for stability. Large, standardized operations deliver outstanding efficiency when product designs, volumes, and supply conditions stay predictable. The challenge is that very little stays predictable for long.
Today, OEMs are dealing with:
In this environment, the EMS partners that win are not simply the ones with the most capacity. They are the ones that can redirect that capacity intelligently.
Q: How have OEM expectations of their EMS partners changed?
“Five years ago, the first conversation with a new customer was usually about price and capacity,” says Kanusit. “Today, the first question is often: what happens when something changes? A component goes on allocation, demand doubles, or a customer needs production in another region. OEMs want to know their partner has already thought about that, and has a plan.”
Agility is easy to claim and harder to prove. In practice, an adaptive EMS provider shows it in four ways.
Q: How can an OEM tell whether an EMS partner is truly adaptive?
“Look at what happens under pressure, not in the sales presentation,” Kanusit explains. “An adaptive partner gets its engineers involved before the design is frozen, has more than one region to build in, and can show you how it handled the last shortage. Agility is something you prove on the factory floor.”
“Agility is something you prove on the factory floor.”
Kanusit Boonrukvanit
Business Development Director at SVI
Adaptive EMS partners engage early. Through design for manufacturing (DFM) reviews, new product introduction (NPI), and prototype builds, they help OEMs remove risk before a product reaches the production line, and then ramp quickly once the design is frozen.
A multi-region manufacturing network gives OEMs options. Production can be placed near customers, balanced between sites, or transferred when cost, capacity, or regional requirements change, without starting the partnership over.
When a component goes on allocation, an adaptive partner already has a response: alternate source qualification, component authenticity checks, and root-cause analysis that keep the build moving without compromising quality.
The most valuable partners handle both high-mix, complex builds and high-volume mass production, so a product does not need to change partners as it grows.
It would be easy to read “agility is the new scale” as an argument against size. It is not. The adaptive EMS does not trade scale for agility; it combines them.
Scale without agility becomes rigid. Agility without scale cannot carry a successful product into the market. What OEMs need is a partner that brings advanced engineering and NPI capability together with globally scaled, high-volume production, inside one integrated EMS relationship. That is what “high mix and high volume” really means.
Q: Does this mean scale matters less than it used to?
“Not at all. Scale is still the foundation,” says Kanusit. “The difference is what you do with it. At SVI, we combine advanced engineering and NPI with high-volume production, so a customer can start with a prototype and grow to hundreds of thousands of units a month without changing partners. That is what high mix and high volume means to us.”
For more than 40 years, SVI has grown into a Top 50 EMS provider worldwide by pairing manufacturing scale with the flexibility to respond to customer needs. Agility is one of SVI’s four core values, alongside Reliability, Innovation, and a Global Mindset, and it shows up across the business.
With more than 6,500 people across its sites, SVI serves OEMs in markets including communication and IoT, industrial and automation, automotive and e-mobility, MedTech, CleanTech and energy, aerospace, and AI data center electronics.
Q: What sets SVI apart as the industry changes?
“Our strength is that we have been adapting for 40 years,” Kanusit says. “We built a network of six production sites across Asia, Europe, and North America, invested in vertical integration, opened our Technology & Innovation Centre in Hangzhou, and this year we are adding PCB manufacturing at our headquarters. Every step was about giving customers more options and fewer handoffs. For us, agility is not a campaign message. It is how we grew into a Top 50 EMS provider, and how we intend to lead in the decade ahead.”
If adaptability matters to your next program, these questions help separate claims from capability:
The EMS industry is entering a new phase. Capacity remains essential, but it is no longer the only measure of strength. The partners that will shape the next decade are those that can absorb change, redirect resources, and keep customers’ products moving to market, whatever the conditions.
Q: What advice would you give an OEM planning its next program?
“Choose a partner for where your product is going, not only where it is today,” says Kanusit. “The right EMS partner should support your first prototype and your millionth unit, and respond quickly whenever the market changes in between.”
The future of EMS may not belong only to the biggest, but to those who adapt best. At SVI, we are building for both: the scale to deliver, and the agility to adapt.
Ready to work with an EMS partner built to adapt? Contact the SVI team to discuss your next program, from NPI to high-volume production.