One Platform, One Picture: How the Global Electronics Association is Changing the Intelligence Game

Jun 11, 2026
KEY SUMMARY:
  • The Global Electronics Association is building a more unified view of the electronics market by bringing leading European and global EMS, PCB, and editorial intelligence programs under one platform.
  • The effort preserves decades of trusted industry data and relationships while giving these intelligence programs a stronger long-term home.
  • The goal is clearer, more connected market insight—helping the industry move from fragmented data to a more complete picture.

by Philip Stoten, Scoop Communications

The electronics manufacturing industry has never been short of data. What it has been short of is coherence. For most of its history, market intelligence has lived in fragments, produced by different organisations, on different timelines, with no common thread connecting the European picture to the global one. 

That is beginning to change, and it is changing fast. 

In the space of a few weeks in early 2026, the Global Electronics Association brought two landmark data programmes into its portfolio: the in4ma European EMS and PCB statistical programmes, built over decades by Dieter G. Weiss, and the New Venture Research global EMS intelligence programme, developed over more than thirty years by Randall Sherman. Add the long-running Manufacturing Market Insider newsletter, and you have something the industry has never quite had before: a single, institutionally backed platform spanning European and global EMS data, PCB market statistics, company rankings, and editorial intelligence. 

I sat down with Christoph Solka, the Association's Director of Industry Intelligence, to understand what is being built here and why it matters. 

The conversation started with the obvious question: planned strategy or happy opportunism? 

"I wouldn't frame it as one or the other," Solka told me. "There was certainly a vision, but strategy alone is useless if there is no opportunity. It also helped that there was a clear desire to secure the long-term future of those programmes. You could build something on a greenfield basis, but it is more advantageous to build on something already well established in the market." 

What the Association has assembled is not just data. It is history, trust, and decades of accumulated industry relationships. The in4ma European EMS survey is now in its eighteenth year. The NVR programme has been the global reference point for EMS market intelligence for over three decades. Each was built on a foundation of personal trust between its founder and the hundreds of companies that shared sensitive information year after year. 

Carrying that forward is a responsibility Solka takes seriously. "We will continue in the spirit of Randall Sherman and Dieter Weiss. We want to preserve that trust first and foremost." Weiss continues as an active advisor. Sherman's long-standing team members are continuing the NVR work. The continuity is real, not just stated. 

But continuity is only half the ambition. The other half is integration. The vision is a platform where European and global data talk to each other coherently, where a company appearing in both the European rankings and the global rankings is represented identically, where a trend in European automotive segment data is connectable to global end-market signals, and where the industry can finally see itself whole rather than in pieces. 

Solka is careful about timelines. "It is still too early to say what it will look like in concrete terms. There is no fixed timeline. We will work continuously in that direction and steadily expand the scope." On methodology, the approach is deliberately measured: significant investment in the IT infrastructure running in the background, where users will notice little change, and a very slow, careful evolution on content methodology, with harmonisation between programmes approached with caution. 

The word Solka and I kept returning to was harmonised. Not homogenised, not standardised, but harmonised. The goal is data that is synchronised across programmes while preserving the methodological rigour that made each one trusted in the first place. 

The Global Electronics Association brings one further advantage that neither Weiss nor Sherman had independently: a global membership of more than 3,000 companies across the entire electronics value chain. That membership is both a distribution network and a feedback mechanism, ensuring the intelligence produced remains connected to what the industry actually needs. 

The electronics manufacturing industry has always been data-rich and insight-poor. The Association is making a serious bet that it can change that. The moves of 2026 are the opening play.

Philip Stoten is a journalist, speaker and host specialising in the global electronics manufacturing services industry. He hosts the EMS@C-Level, EMS & The Economist, and MADE IN EUROPE podcasts.