"We have been running at capacity 7 days a week, 24 hours a day for quite a while. So although this expansion comes at a time when the economy isn’t that great, we haven’t seen any decrease in demand. On the contrary, despite the economic conditions, we are optimistic about the growth of the network appliance and small form factor industrial PCs. This expansion allows us to grow further and take more orders from our clients" said George Chen, Lanner’s factory manager.

At the same time as the new factory was set up, the whole production process has been evaluated and re-configured. With the help of Japanese lean manufacturing experts, numerous manufacturing quality improvements have been made. To better cater for the small production runs that are common in industrial computing, the assembly lines now utilise the popular cell manufacturing approach to provide more flexibility. Also, when doubling from two to four SMT lines, more modern equipment has been purchased to cater for larger motherboards and greater output.

Will Chen, COO of Lanner Electronics shares the optimism of the factory manager. "According to Gartner, the market for Unified Threat Management (UTM) is expected to see compound growth of 20 to 25% until 2013. As the hardware supplier to several of the leading UTM companies, we expect significant volume increases. We also see more demand for our high-end systems. Cloud computing and high-speed mobile communications networks are bringing significant increases to internet traffic, all of which needs to go through firewalls. The processing power of these firewalls needs to increase as it takes a lot of processing power to do deep packet inspection and virus scanning on all the data that is going through our networks these days."