Electronic Manufacturing Services Provider (EMS)
Electronic Manufacturing Services Provider (EMS) describes companies that provide contract manufacturing services for electronic assemblies, circuit boards and other products, and/or services related to the electronics industry. Electronic Manufacturing Services or Contract Electronic Manufacturing (CEM) also describes an entire industry that came into being in the late 1970s and early 1980’s.
The origin of this industry started with the development of a "new breed" of CEMs when IBM entered the PC market in the early 1980’s and began outsourcing various manufacturing operations to companies (the "new breed') that specialized in providing "turnkey material procurement" for electronic assemblies and printed circuit boards. Simply stated, OEMs found that it was more cost effective to contract a portion of their manufacturing to companies that specialized in electronic assemblies. The OEM still retained the ownership of the brand name and circuit design, the contract manufacturer acted as a private label manufacturer and benefited from the scale of production orders. This launched an entirely new electronic manufacturing services industry, as we know it today, because it fulfilled two purposes. First, it allowed OEMs to outsource complicated electronics to companies who specialized in that type of manufacturing, and secondly, it provided a large scale market for companies to focus on the manufacturing of electronic assemblies and components.
Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s many of the smaller CEMs either combined, or closed, in part, because many of them were losing business to electronic manufacturing services providers that started to provide a wider range of services to the OEMs. The Millennia Group is one of those contract manufacturers that did start offering additional services to their OEM clients and developed into an
