Guenter Lauber, CEO, ASM Assembly Systems

Firstronic LLC continues to lead the "reshoring" trend in the EMS industry. Over the past 3 years, we've achieved over 50% compound annual growth in our domestic operation (Grand Rapids, Michigan) through the launch and transfer of programs that were either already being produced off-shore or were earmarked to be sourced off-shore.

We are finding that there is a lack of domestic US capacity in the EMS industry and we are demonstrating that we can be competitive globally by starting with very aggressive material pricing (on par with much larger, Tier-1 competitors), state-of-the-art equipment / processes, and very skilled / highly trained employees.

We recently launched a new plant in Juarez, Mexico and we have secured contracts that will continue to fuel our current growth rate in North America for the next 3 years. This is in addition to JV operations in China, India and the Czech Republic. In short, while we have a global footprint, we are finding that the biggest source of growth for our business is coming from North America -- it's great to see the strong rebound in this region as we demonstrate that we can be competitive globally. We expect to increase our number of employees in NA by at least 100 in 2015 and the projection is for this to be higher for the following two years.