Asteelflash Brand Guidelines: Asteel, Flash Electronics & a 2020 Sale to USI

A local contract manufacturer for the French market.

Asteelflash began in 1999 as Asteel, a contract electronics maker in the Paris region. The company says Gilles Benhamou founded it as a local manufacturer serving the French market; English and French Wikipedia both give the year and the founder, and French Wikipedia says Asteel was built on the purchase of an existing French subcontractor that was struggling with fast-changing production technology. Wikipedia in both languages gives the group’s head office as Neuilly-Plaisance, east of Paris.

Its work is the assembly of electronics for other companies’ products. French Wikipedia describes the core of the business as printed circuit board assembly, using both surface-mount and through-hole techniques, and the company today lists design, engineering, prototyping, board assembly, box build and system integration among its services, with markets ranging from cars and aircraft to industrial, energy and smart-building equipment.

Growth came through buying other firms. In 2005, the company says, it set up Asteel Technology as a subsidiary for mechatronics and plastic moulding in France. English Wikipedia records early expansion into Tunisia, at Mégrine and Fouchana, and into England, at Bedford; the company dates the Bedford purchase, of a local contract manufacturer called MRP, to 2008.

Asteel plus Flash.

The name came from a transatlantic purchase. In 2008 Asteel bought Flash Electronics, an American contract manufacturer that English Wikipedia says was founded in 1994; at the time, the company says, Flash consisted of a plant in Fremont, California, and another in Suzhou, China. The combined business took the joined-up name Asteelflash, and French Wikipedia dates the creation of Asteelflash Group in its present form to that deal. English Wikipedia describes the group as a multinational specialising in printed circuit board assembly that also offers design and aftermarket services.

More purchases followed. The company and English Wikipedia list TES Electronic Solutions at Langon in Brittany in 2011; Catalyst Manufacturing Services, with plants at Raleigh in North Carolina and Tijuana in Mexico, in 2012; and the German group EN ElectronicNetwork, also in 2012, which the company says added four facilities and a design centre in Germany and the Czech Republic. In 2017, the company says, it built a new plant at La Soukra in Tunisia, aimed mainly at cost-sensitive work for European customers.

Rankings placed it among the larger contract assemblers. In April 2019 the French trade magazine Electroniques reported that Asteelflash was 21st in the 2018 world ranking of the top 50 electronics subcontractors compiled by the American newsletter Manufacturing Market Insider, with about 6,200 staff, the highest of four French groups on the list. French Wikipedia adds that it ranked first in France and second in Europe, behind the German group Zollner, in 2019.

Design and documentation.

Contract electronics makers build products that carry other companies’ names, so the pictures they show of themselves tend to be about process rather than product. The most common image is a green circuit board moving along a conveyor line, often photographed at an angle so the rows of components catch the light. Close behind come pick-and-place machines caught in motion, their heads blurred as they set parts onto the board, and macro close-ups of solder joints, shiny and precise.

People appear too, usually as operators at inspection stations or assembly benches. Many wear blue or grey static-control smocks, with caps or gloves where the work calls for them, and the photographs stress tidy workstations, labelled bins and bright, even lighting. Clean-room scenes, with full gowns and soft white light, tend to go with medical or optical work.

Outside the factory, the imagery turns to buildings: low white or grey plants with large windows and a sign on the facade, photographed under a clear sky, often with a map of sites worldwide nearby. Trade fairs supply the rest. Stands at shows such as productronica in Munich and IPC APEX EXPO in the United States give these companies a public face, with demonstration lines, sample boards and banners in their corporate colours.

The names themselves are usually set in plain, sturdy sans-serifs, with one strong corporate colour, often a blue or a green, carrying the identity. The guides that follow look at how individual makers fit, or depart from, that common picture, and at what can be checked about who founded them, who owns them and where they build.

“Thinking globally yet acting locally.”

The company is no longer independent. In December 2019 Circuits Assembly reported that Asteelflash had signed a deal to be acquired by Universal Scientific Industrial (USI), also known by its Chinese name Huanxu Electronics, subject to approval in China, the US and the European Union; the magazine said Asteelflash would handle smaller production runs and USI the volume builds, and that Asteelflash then had 17 production sites in 10 countries. On 3 December 2020 USI announced that it had completed the purchase, made through Asteelflash’s parent company, Financière AFG, and that the existing management would stay. USI describes itself as a subsidiary of the Taiwanese group ASE Technology Holding.

The two sides described the deal in different terms. USI’s chairman, Jeffrey Chen, called it a critical step in the group’s “modularization, diversification, and globalization” strategy, and said the plan after closing covered sales, supply chain and technology collaboration; Benhamou, then Asteelflash’s chief executive, called it “a new milestone” and said the company was excited to join the USI family. USI said the combined group would have 27 manufacturing locations in 10 countries. Before the deal, Circuits Assembly reported, USI had plants in Taiwan, Mexico, China and Poland and a joint venture in Brazil.

Asteelflash still trades under its own name within USI. Its website lists 16 facilities, among them plants in Normandy, Brittany, Alsace and the Aisne, design and development sites at Hamburg and Meylan, factories at Eberbach and Bad Hersfeld in Germany, Plzeň in the Czech Republic, Bedford, La Soukra, Suzhou, Tijuana and Milpitas in California, and a USI plant near Wrocław in Poland. Its website names Nicolas Denis as chief executive. The company’s slogan is “Thinking globally yet acting locally,” and it calls its quality standard the Asteelflash Excellence System.

The company frames its value as being close to its customers: a global organisation, it says, with local teams supporting each product through its life, from prototypes to volume production, across the sites it lists on four continents.

For a design guide, Asteelflash shows how a merged name can outlast two changes of owner. Compare Zollner, the German contract manufacturer ranked ahead of it in Europe, and Kitron, another European maker of electronics for other brands. For this guide we use a claret and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Asteelflash’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.