Recently, several A-share listed companies in the PCB industry have successively released their Q1 2026 reports. These quarterly reports collectively point to a single trend—a comprehensive surge in industry performance. However, behind the seemingly universal rise in the data, a subtle dividing line is emerging—not every company that has captured AI-related dividends is equally jubilant, and the deep-seated divergence within the industry is gradually unfolding.
01. "Divergence" Amid High Prosperity In Q1 2026, the overall prosperity of the printed circuit board (PCB) industry continued to rise. According to TPCA data, the global PCB market grew by 15.8% in 2025, reaching a market size of $85.2 billion. The global PCB market is projected to rise by a further 12.5% in 2026 to around $95.78 billion. However, in this high-prosperity industry boom, not all participants have gained a share of the market upside.
Specifically, PCB leader WUS Printed Circuit (Kunshan) Co., Ltd. achieved a revenue of RMB 6.214 billion in Q1, a year-on-year increase of 53.91%, and a net profit attributable to the parent company of RMB 1.242 billion, a year-on-year increase of 62.90%. The profit growth rate outpaced the revenue growth rate, with economies of scale and profitability quality improving simultaneously, and the weighted average return on net assets rising to 7.81%. Shennan Circuits achieved a revenue of RMB 6.596 billion, setting a new single-quarter high since its listing, representing a year-on-year increase of 37.90%, and a net profit attributable to the parent company of RMB 850 million, a year-on-year increase of 73.01%. Benefiting from product structure optimization driven by AI computing power upgrades and rising demand in the memory market, its capacity utilization rate remained at a high level.
Dongshan Precision Manufacturing Co., Ltd. has followed a more unique growth trajectory. The company's Q1 revenue reached RMB 13.138 billion, a year-on-year increase of 52.72%, and its net profit attributable to the parent company was RMB 1.11 billion, surging 143.47% year-on-year and jumping 581% quarter-on-quarter from Q4 last year. Regarding the core reason for the sharp profit surge, the company stated that it was primarily due to the consolidation of financial data from Source Photonics and GMD Group during the reporting period, which were not included in the previous year. Additionally, while maintaining stability in its traditional businesses, the company's optical module business capitalized on the industry boom and expedited customer orders, doubling its revenue year-on-year and making a core contribution to the company's revenue and profit in this reporting period.
Why is the overall prosperity of the industry so intense? To clarify the underlying logic, one must look toward the AI computing power arena.
The explosion in AI hardware demand is the core engine igniting this round of the PCB market rally. AI servers powered by NVIDIA’s GB200 chips continue to see surging rack-level power density. Reliable inter-GPU communication imposes extremely stringent requirements on high-layer PCBs, advanced High-Density Interconnect (HDI) boards and packaging substrates. Compared to traditional servers, PCBs used in AI servers generally exceed 20 layers, with material usage being 3 to 5 times that of traditional servers, and the value increasing by 8 to 12 times.
Driven precisely by this demand, the upstream and downstream of the industry chain are experiencing a simultaneous surge in volume and price. Orders for PCBs with more than 18 layers, advanced HDI, and packaging substrates remain fully booked, with some segments even seeing order overflow to other manufacturers. The one-way pull of AI computing power demand forms the fundamental backdrop for the industry's overall performance explosion.
Consequently, the upstream materials sector is equally booming. Shengyi Technology Co., Ltd. reported a Q1 revenue of RMB 8.141 billion, a year-on-year increase of 45.09%, and a net profit attributable to the parent company of RMB 1.158 billion, a year-on-year increase of 105.47%. Its copper-clad laminate (CCL) business benefited from the pass-through of rising raw material prices and growing demand for high-end products. The company actively adjusted its product structure, driving a leapfrog improvement in profitability.
However, not all companies are basking in the sunshine.
Notably, global PCB leader Pengding Holdings (Zhen Ding Technology) reported a Q1 revenue of RMB 7.986 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 1.25%, a net profit attributable to the parent company of RMB 463 million, a year-on-year decrease of 5.21%, and a net profit excluding non-recurring gains and losses of RMB 326 million, a substantial year-on-year decline of 31.85%. In its traditional consumer electronics business, per-unit usage and pricing have not yet shown a clear trend of simultaneous volume and price increases. Coupled with disruptions from exchange rates and other factors, its profitability is under significant pressure.
02. "Value Leap" Driven by AI Computing Power This round of seemingly "evenly distributed" prosperity is being gradually divided by another force—the continuous escalation of raw material costs is squeezing profit margins.
Recently, prices for core PCB raw materials, including copper-clad laminate (CCL), copper foil, prepreg, and gold salts, have risen across the board. Copper foil accounts for approximately 40% to 50% of CCL costs, and copper prices are at historical highs. Electronic-grade glass cloth has seen massive cumulative price increases. Furthermore, the Middle East situation has driven up energy costs, leading to a simultaneous rise in the prices of low-dielectric-constant resin materials.
The relentless rise in upstream prices has been transmitted down the industry chain. Multiple CCL manufacturers have implemented multiple price hikes since the second half of 2025. Kingboard Laminates, citing the Middle East situation driving up epoxy resin and natural gas costs alongside high copper prices, announced a uniform 10% increase in processing fees for all board materials, prepregs, and copper foil. In April 2026, PCB prices were projected to rise by 40% month-on-month from March, and cloud service providers have accepted the price increases to secure capacity.
Facing the direct impact of cost pressures, companies at different positions in the industry chain have demonstrated vastly different capacities to absorb the shock. Leading companies focusing on high-end PCBs and tied to top-tier customers, leveraging their product portfolio advantages and rigid order demand, can effectively pass the cost pressure on to downstream clients.
Conversely, for companies still entrenched in the mid-to-low-end market characterized by fierce homogeneous competition, cost-side erosion is continuously compressing their already meager profit margins. Small and medium-sized enterprises lack exchange rate hedging mechanisms and are more severely impacted by rising raw material prices, with some experiencing sharp declines in net profit or even incurring losses. This stark contrast is rapidly widening the divergence within the PCB industry.
03. Valuation and Prosperity Remain in a Reasonable Range So, how will the subsequent landscape evolve? The key to this question lies in the technological route transformation initiated by the new GB300 and Rubin series platforms, and the resulting reshaping of value logic.
Guojin Securities recently released a research report noting that the continuous iteration of large model inference architectures is driving a significant leap in the value proposition of PCBs. NVIDIA has introduced a "decoupled inference" architecture, imposing more stringent requirements on PCBs for high-density packaging substrates and higher power density for power delivery and thermal management. In the scaling evolution from chip to rack, the introduction of HBM4 requires the interposer to support thousand-bit level I/O. In the CoWoP solution, the silicon interposer combined with the GPU/HBM is directly mounted on a reinforced PCB, with the PCB assuming all functions originally handled by the packaging substrate. The PCB value per GPU can reach $600, three times that of the GB200 platform. This is expected to create a market space of over $600 million in 2027, and could surge to over $2 billion by 2028.
Meanwhile, the PCB layer count in GB300 servers has jumped from 10 layers to over 20 layers, with some high-end models reaching 34 to 64 layers. The Rubin Ultra NVL576 even replaces copper cables with a 78-layer M9-grade orthogonal backplane. Consequently, the proportion of PCBs in the AI system BOM is approaching that of semiconductor-grade components.
Goldman Sachs predicts that from 2025 to 2030, AI server demand will grow by approximately 4.3 times, and the supply-demand imbalance for high-end PCBs is expected to persist until 2027. Against this backdrop, PCBs are undergoing a value transition from a "bearing platform" to a "core interconnect medium."
A research report by China Merchants Securities similarly asserts that the continuous wave of AI applications will drive sustained robust demand for data center switches and server PCBs. The AI server PCB market will capture a significant share of the overall PCB market, and manufacturers actively expanding in the AI PCB sector will seize new development opportunities.
However, the other side of market sentiment cannot be ignored. CITIC Securities noted in a research report that, reviewing the electronics sector in Q1 2026, AI data center-related demand maintained rapid growth, while the automotive sector saw inventory replenishment demand. Consumer electronics demand was somewhat affected, and the pace of downstream recovery was uneven. Although AI remains the primary driver, the structural demand divergence from end-point consumer electronics to industrial control and other fields has not yet been fully bridged.
Industry analysts are concerned that the PCB industry has currently triggered a massive expansion wave for high-end capacity. Once the newly added capacity is concentrated and released into production after 2026, if the growth rate of AI-related terminal demand fails to sustain its high-speed trajectory, the supply-demand landscape could experience a large-scale reversal. Guojin Securities also warned that although the PCB industry has multiple barriers driving increased concentration, the stock competition pressure for mature high-end boards remains, and high customer concentration may also bring risks of order fluctuations.
Various signs indicate that while the soaring figures in the quarterly reports are indeed dazzling, the market's rational gaze has begun to look beyond simple earnings growth toward deeper structural divergence. AI computing power is injecting a second wave of explosive momentum into the PCB industry, but it is also quietly rewriting the long-term survival rules for different segments of the industry chain.