Compeq Brand Guidelines: The Luzhu Circuit-Board Maker Founded in 1973

A Taoyuan board maker from the start.

Compeq Manufacturing — 華通電腦 in Chinese — was set up in August 1973 in Luzhu, then a township of Taoyuan County in northern Taiwan. Taiwan’s company register, as summarised by the business site TechNews, gives its approval date as 30 August 1973 and its English name as Compeq Manufacturing Company Limited, with “COMPEQ” as the short form. The company describes itself as one of the first printed circuit board makers in Taiwan to answer the government’s policy of building high-technology industries, and says it began with single-sided and double-sided boards.

The company’s own history moves quickly from there. In 1983, it says, it began mass-producing computer boards of six layers and more, taking the island’s board industry into multilayer production. In 1989 it set up a plant in Utah, in the United States, to serve customers in North America, the company says. The register summary records its listing on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in July 1990, under the short name 華通.

Expansion into mainland China followed. The company’s history dates a production base at Huizhou, in Guangdong, to 1996, while its own list of sites gives the Huizhou plant’s start as October 1995. A higher-specification plant at the Dayuan Industrial Park in Taoyuan, built around a class-1000 cleanroom for precision products and development work, is dated 1998 in the history and February 1999 in the site list. In 2004 two subsidiaries followed, the company says: a flexible-board business in Huizhou and a small-scale assembly business in Suzhou.

The register summary still places the company’s seat in Luzhu, which is now a district of Taoyuan City, more than half a century after the business began there.

Boards for phones, networks and satellites.

Compeq makes printed circuit boards rather than finished devices. On its website it groups its products into five families: high-density interconnect (HDI) boards, flexible boards, rigid-flex boards, high-layer-count boards and surface-mount assembly. The register summary names multilayer printed circuit boards as its main line of business.

The company’s list of sites matches each plant to its markets. It says the founding Luzhu plant makes boards for space communications, smartphones, tablets, network and telecom equipment and PC products; the Dayuan plant serves smartphones, tablets, high-end notebooks and consumer electronics; and the Huizhou flexible-board plant, which the company dates to August 2004, makes flexible and rigid-flex boards. A plant at Fuling, in Chongqing, listed from June 2014, also serves smartphones, tablets and high-end notebooks, while two further sites in Suzhou and Huizhou provide module assembly rather than bare boards.

The newest site is in Thailand. Bangkok Post reported on 17 December 2024 that Compeq (Thailand) Co had opened a factory the previous day on 112 rai of land in the Asia Industrial Estate in Samut Prakan. Thailand’s Board of Investment, whose secretary-general presided over the opening, said the firm had taken one year to build the plant and install its machinery and would begin production that month; the paper said it already employed 600 Thai workers, with 1,500 expected the following year.

The Board of Investment described Compeq as the world’s fifth-largest printed circuit board maker, according to the paper, which reported that the company could make boards of up to 34 layers for electric cars, smartphones, medical equipment, data centres and satellites, and that it planned to export 90 percent of the Thai plant’s output. Compeq’s own site list gives the Thai plant’s focus as data centres, satellite communications and automotive electronics, and dates it to December 2024.

Taiwan’s board makers and their plants.

Printed circuit boards sit inside almost every electronic product, yet the companies that make them rarely sell to the public. Their brands are written for engineers, buyers and investors, and their pictures tend to come from a short, shared list: a green or black board lit from the side so that its copper traces catch the light, a macro shot of vias and solder pads, or the gold-plated contact fingers along a board’s edge.

The factory is the other recurring subject. Board makers show long plating lines, rows of drilling machines, clean rooms and inspection stations, because scale and process are what they are selling. Flexible circuits get their own pose — a thin amber strip curled over a fingertip — while makers of IC substrates, the fine-lined carriers that sit between a chip and its board, tend to show close-ups of dense, glossy panels rather than finished products.

Names are often short and technical: TTM Technologies, for one, says its initials stand for “time-to-market.” Few makers publish formal colour standards, so the palettes in these guides are our own reading of the trade’s materials — the green of solder mask, the dark of laminate, the warm metal of copper and gold — rather than any company’s specification.

The trade meets at its own shows. The TPCA Show in Taipei gathers Taiwan’s board and substrate makers and their suppliers, and the electronica fairs, in Munich and elsewhere, bring board makers together with the component and equipment trade; TTM Technologies, for one, announced that it would exhibit at electronica India in Bangalore in 2026. The makers in this guide are spread across the United States, Taiwan, mainland China, Japan and Europe, and several of them run plants in more than one of those places.

A Taoyuan name with an export map.

Compeq’s move to Thailand was part of a wider shift. Bangkok Post reported in December 2024 that Compeq was among a number of circuit board companies from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan that had decided to expand into Thailand over the previous two years, and that foreign board makers had submitted 107 investment project proposals to the Board of Investment between 2023 and November 2024. Many planned to start operations between late 2024 and 2025, the board’s secretary-general said, adding that more such projects had made Thailand a circuit board production hub in Southeast Asia.

The company presents itself through its record as a supplier and employer as much as through its products. On its website it lists two RBA silver certifications and Taiwan Corporate Sustainability Awards for 2014 and 2015, as the company gives them. Its site is written chiefly in Chinese, under the name 華通, and it publishes shift-time notices for its plant workforce alongside its investor pages.

The two names do different jobs. 華通 is the name used in Taiwan’s register and on the Taiwan Stock Exchange; “COMPEQ”, in capitals, is the English short form recorded in the same register and the name used for the Thai subsidiary, COMPEQ (Thailand) Co., Ltd.

For a design guide, Compeq shows how a component maker’s identity rests on its name and its map of plants rather than on a consumer product. Compare Unimicron and Zhen Ding, two other circuit board makers listed in Taiwan. For this guide we use a deep board green, a copper tone and a pale grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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