Anaheim’s Multi-Fineline Electronix Inc., a maker of flexible printed circuit boards for cell phones and other mobile devices, opened two plants in China that are expected to boost the company’s revenue in coming years.
Multi-Fineline, which is known as M-Flex, opened a circuit board plant in Suzhou, near Shanghai. It also opened an assembly facility for finished circuit boards in Chengdu, east of Shanghai.
The two facilities have a combined 900,000 square feet of space.
The added production should boost M-Flex’s annual revenue capacity to $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion for the 12 months through September, and to $1.3 billion by early 2012, according to Chief Executive Reza Meshgin.
M-Flex had $790 million in sales for the 12 months through September 2010.
The company’s circuit boards are used in cell phones, smart phones and other mobile devices.
M-Flex doesn’t disclose customers. Apple Inc. and Research in Motion Ltd., maker of Blackberry, are known to use the company’s circuit boards.
The circuit boards are flexible, which makes them easier to design into phones, barcode scanners and other devices.
Rivals include Singapore’s Flextronics International Ltd., South Korea’s Young Poong Electronics Co., Taiwan’s Foxconn Electronics Inc. and others.
M-Flex is part of Singapore’s WBL Corp., a holding company that operates technology and other businesses. WBL owns 62% of M-Flex’s publicly traded shares and a third of the company’s voting stock.
As of last week, M-Flex had a market value of about $500 million.
The latest expansion is part of a multiyear effort by M-Flex to shift nearly all production to China.
The company once produced much of its circuit boards at its Anaheim headquarters, which still does prototypes and more complex jobs.
M-Flex has about 90 workers in Anaheim, down from 500 in 2006.
The company got its start in Anaheim in 1984. A decade later, it opened its first China plant in Suzhou. A second China plant followed in 2003.
MFlex went public in 2004.
WBL, then known as Wearne Brothers Ltd., first invested in M-Flex in the 1980s and built its stake up to about two-thirds by the late 1990s.
