Tatar ICL to launch motherboard production in 2023

The Tatarstan ICL group will launch the production of motherboards in the third quarter of 2023, Evgeny Stepanov, CEO of Iceel-KPO VS JSC, said at a meeting of the board of directors of Tatneftekhiminvest-holding JSC in Kazan on November 29. At the beginning of the year, the enterprises will be engaged in surface mounting, but by the end of the year it is planned to start printing their own boards, he explained.

“In the first quarter, we are launching assembly production, new conveyor lines. And in the third quarter – the actual production of motherboards,” Stepanov said, answering the question of the President of Tatarstan Rustam Minnikhanov about the timing of the launch of the plant. According to him, at the first stage, the design capacity will be 300,000 boards per year, after which it will gradually increase to 1 million pieces per year.

The construction of a new plant of ICL Group began at the end of 2021. The total cost of the investment project is estimated at 3.7 billion rubles, but 2 billion rubles. the management company of the Innopolis SEZ took over, the representative of ICL specified to Vedomosti. “Initial state investment of 2 billion rubles. for the construction of the plant were provided in accordance with the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation No. 1119, which provides for the reimbursement of funds spent on infrastructure, ”said the representative of the press service of Innopolis.

ICL is also in talks to raise debt financing for the purchase of technological equipment, an ICL representative told Vedomosti. The company plans to reapply to the Industry Development Fund for a soft loan, he added. He did not name the amount of the requested loan.

The plant building is expected to be operational in early 2023. Initially, the plant will deal with surface mount motherboards, with board printing the next step, an ICL spokesperson said. “Motherboards will be assembled for desktop, mobile, northern systems, and they will have different configurations, depending on the request,” he added.

How ICL intends to localize the production of motherboards, the representative of the company does not explain. According to Albina Sabirova, head of the company’s marketing service, boards will be produced for domestic processors of all types, including Baikal and Elbrus. But the model of chipsets that will be built into the board has not yet been determined, she specified. “It all depends on the availability of processors. What boards will be available on the market, we will make such boards,” Sabirova said. According to her, the company’s specialists have developed a board for the Baikal-S server processor this year.

At the first stage, the boards will be used for their own needs: ICL assembles PCs, laptops, tablets, monoblocks, servers, data storage systems under its own brand. In addition to automatic lines for mounting boards, the company intends to expand the assembly of computer equipment to 600,000 units per year. According to Sabirova, the developer’s computer equipment is now supplied to the education and healthcare sectors. That is, it is critically important for the enterprise that the motherboard complies with the basic requirements of the register of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, so that computers based on it can continue to be supplied to government agencies, she explained.

The production of motherboards will allow ICL not only to increase the level of product localization, but also to become a supplier for other market players that are represented in the state order market, experts interviewed by Vedomosti explain. “In order to receive a state order, products must be included in the registers of Russian radio-electronic products of the Ministry of Industry and Trade,” explains Promobit CEO Maxim Koposov. – There are two of them, they are established by the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation No. 719 and No. 878. According to them, each specific type of product, be it a server or a PU, is evaluated by the level of localization. The localization score is calculated in points.

“Producing your own boards is mandatory for some types of PCs, and for some types of equipment it gives a huge amount of points. If it is not localized in the Russian Federation, then access to the state order market will be closed,” the top manager explained. It doesn’t really matter how the board is made – surface-mounted or full-cycle, Koposov noted.

Previously, the boards were brought mainly from China and Asian countries, as they were cheaper, explains Koposov. “What is the point of investing billions if it is cheaper to bring from China?”, the expert argues.

In Russia, several companies are engaged in the installation of motherboards, including Rezonit and TePro. In addition, other market players are building motherboard factories – Aquarius, Depo, Record. Also, the Yadro company (KNS Group) announced the start of construction of a full-cycle plant for the production of boards in December 2021 in Dubna. The volume of investments at the first stage will exceed 6 billion rubles, said Andrey Vorobyov, Governor of the Moscow Region.

The main problem of localization is the lack of competencies among Russian companies in the design of motherboards and the inability to build a range of small suppliers, Ivan Pokrovsky, executive director of the Association of Electronics Manufacturers, warns. “Whoever designs a motherboard controls the range of components that are used in their manufacture. If a company takes a reference design purchased from a foreign partner, it falls into the trap and will depend on the entire chain of cooperation, which includes microcomponent manufacturers from different countries. And where they come from and what they can be replaced with, the Russian manufacturer does not know, because before he only mounted them according to someone else’s documentation, ”explains Pokrovsky.

In the case of components, it’s not just a single printed circuit board that needs to be replaced, but hundreds of suppliers to negotiate and organize supply chains around the world, says Pokrovsky. “Today, sanctions restrictions on components are much tougher than on finished equipment. It is possible to bring a laptop and a server to the Russian Federation, but it is forbidden to supply microcircuits, ”he concluded.

A representative of the Yadro company did not respond to Vedomosti’s request by the time of publication.