News and New Products

Is Asia Ready for RoHS?

By Rob Spiegel -- Electronic News, 3/5/2006

With less than four months to go before the July 1, 2006 deadline for RoHS compliance, Asia’s ability to meet the directive’s demands is still largely unknown. RoHS affects a mammoth number of companies across Asia. In Taiwan alone, the Ministry of Economic Affairs estimates RoHS will affect 35,000 export-oriented companies.

Some areas of Asia are well equipped to meet RoHS regulations, while others are still struggling toward compliance. Those regions with the longest experience in selling to Europe have the highest RoHS compliance rates. Japan has been RoHS-ready for years. The country has had strict environmental regulations in place for many years, so complying with RoHS was little burden to Japanese electronics manufacturers.

A recent study by Global Sources Ltd. shows that electronics manufacturers in South Korea and Hong Kong are leading compliance among the Chinese and Korean regions. The study puts South Korea at 91 percent compliant, while Hong Kong is at 84 percent. Taiwan is estimated to be 65 percent compliant, while mainland China is at 50 percent. Not surprisingly, the laggards in all regions tend to be smaller companies.

While the Global Sources study has been widely reported recently in the trade media, it has come under scrutiny, as well. Michael Kirschner, president of San Francisco-based consulting firm Design Chain Associates, noted that the study includes categories that are not covered by the RoHS directive. “Global Sources cherry picked the suppliers they featured in the report, so there are problems with the survey,” said Kirschner. “For one thing, the report covers batteries and auto electronics, and neither of those segments is covered in RoHS – they’re both exempt.”

Kirschner believes that among Chinese territories, Hong Kong companies are doing best in reaching compliance. “The manufacturers are quite savvy in Hong Kong,” said Kirschner. “They’ve been doing quite a bit of training on RoHS, plus they read and understand English.” Kirschner believes the language barrier in mainland China has been an impediment to compliance.

While it may be hard to extract accurate percentages of compliance across Asia, anecdotal evidence indicates there is growing awareness of RoHS. “The market awareness of RoHS in [mainland] China is not as obvious as in Taiwan or Japan, but it is slowly getting heated up,” noted Larry Yen, president of Pacific Oaks Technology, a company that sells RoHS compliance management software. “Almost all the big firms in China have established a RoHS team for handling compliance issues.” He added that small- to mid-size companies in mainland China are still “far away from getting ready for the July 1 deadline.”

Yen noted that interest in RoHS is growing in China. “The demand for RoHS information on new components for new product design is getting stronger,” said Yen. “Time to market has become a critical competitive factor for all companies, so design engineers are poking into the compliance status of components. Whatever [component suppliers] provide compliance information on new components will have the best chance of winning a place in newly design products.”

China has alerted the World Trade Organization that is has developed its own set of RoHS-like regulations, which could help spur readiness across China. Those regulations are still in draft form and are not expected to be formally introduced until later this year. So far, the Chinese version of RoHS identifies the same six substances as RoHS, although the government has issued no categorical exemptions to the law.