Innovation, experimentation and good ol’ clean Taranaki air are leading a family-run electronics company to global success.
“We spend a lot of money on tinkering and experimenting and building stuff just to see whether it works,” says Rob Carruthers, managing director of Precision Microcircuits Ltd, a specialist electronics design and manufacture company.
“We foster an environment of innovation here and the business has been set up to be good at it. For us, being flexible and efficient at testing ideas and assumptions is vital to how quickly we can innovate.”
It’s a formula that has been hugely successful and has seen Precision Microcircuits, which designs and makes microcircuit components for a range of electronic products worldwide, become a respected operator in a competitive market.
The company of creative thinkers and technical engineers exports about 70% of the 7.5 million units it makes each year to markets in Mexico, the United States, Australia, China, and Malaysia. A key customer is Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, while it has also worked on “some pretty sensitive products” for the US military and the Royal New Zealand Air Force.
Precision Microcircuits uses a technology called Thick Film – a type of screen printing process, where rather than soldering components into a circuit board, the circuits are built by screen printing the materials in layers.
No one else is using Thick Film in New Zealand, but there’s stiff competition in Asia.
“The big companies tend to focus on high volume, easy-to-make products. So we focus on the edges of the market, and aim to be innovative, work with customers to develop specific solutions, and quality check every unit we make throughout production, which other companies don’t do,” says Rob.
Precision Microcircuits’ genesis and evolution has, quite literally, been a number eight wire story.
As a contract fencer in the 1960s, Rob’s dad Barrie, who dabbled in electronics as a hobby, used a bit of fencing wire to fashion up a repeater to bring television reception to a rural Taranaki property.
It morphed into a business installing television repeater sites, and branched out into the invention of an electronic dog trainer and a paging solution for the Hāwera Fire Station. Barrie then attended a seminar about Thick Film, saw it as an opportunity and built his own production plant.
Rob joined in 2000 and, like his father, is largely self-taught, but skews towards the product development side of the business.
Tucked away up a rural road at the foot of Mt Taranaki, Precision Microcircuits appears to be as far away as possible from the technology sector it operates in.
“We’re quite happy about that,” Rob says. “Where we are hasn’t been a barrier to doing business in New Zealand or internationally.”
And even the rural Taranaki air is an advantage. “Elsewhere, the industry spends quite a bit of time cleaning the air they use for their production process, whereas we don’t have to worry about that up here.
We suck the clear Taranaki air from outside and just run it through some filters – it’s better than you’ll get anywhere else,” Rob laughs.