HIGH-TECH
EMS Companies
World's Most Productive Companies
Electronics Manufacturing: Moving Up the Value Chain
All nine EMS companies in our research are global providers of electronics manufacturing services. They operate asset-intensive, multi-plant networks across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, offering design engineering, NPI, volume build, configuration, direct fulfillment, and after-market services. Most pursue a shift toward complex, regulated, or higher-reliability end markets, such as cloud/data centers, communications, industrial, aerospace and defense, automotive and e-mobility, and healthcare.
Strategically, the group has pushed up the value chain into design and precision technologies, while standardizing factory systems and supply-chain orchestration to manage thousands of SKUs with short lead times. All faced the same macro drivers: pandemic disruptions, component shortages, labor constraints, trade policy shifts, and, most recently, AI-infrastructure demand that lifted server and optics programs.
Productivity rose through a better mix, digital supply chains, and regionalized networks. Normalized inventories, platformization in AI data centers, and standardized racks and optics improved yields and throughput. Portfolio discipline shifted assets toward higher-return, design-rich programs, resulting in increased units per labor hour and OEE.
Top 100 World's Most Productive Companies - EMS Companies
Productivity Snapshot
Despite the long-term nature of this market and these businesses, the High-tech EMS peer group saw a dramatically different productivity trend compared to many other industries: a surge of productivity from 2020 to 2024.
- Productivity in the sector has grown overall by 27.7% over the last six years. This Peer Group performed well above the average for manufacturers represented in the IPI and continues to trend up and to the right, while the general index and other peer groups in High Tech have returned to stagnation and regression over the last two years.
- All these companies had positive productivity growth in 2023 and 2024.
- 2024 Productivity improved by an average of 2.8% across these companies.
- Sanmina earned its position within the LNS Research 2025 World’s Most Productive Companies by growing productivity 18.8% more than the average of its peers/competitors over the last six years. Sanmina’s leading productivity performance is driven by emphasizing end-to-end manufacturing solutions, vertical integration of supply chain elements, investments in process innovation through automation, and advanced analytics tools.
