How Zollner Scaled From Startup To 400 Jobs In Cartago with General Manager Octavio Matus

You can feel it the moment you walk into a great factory: the pace is confident, the details are tight, and the people carry real pride in what they build. That’s what I hear again and again as I sit down in Costa Rica with Octavio Matus, General Manager of Zollner Costa Rica, for a candid look at how a site grows from early uncertainty into a high-performing electronics manufacturing operation. 

We talk about the real startup work behind an EMS launch: developing local suppliers, training teams, and building a culture that lasts. Octavio shares why retention and loyalty are not “soft” topics at all, but a hard advantage for quality, speed, and problem-solving. When your leaders and engineers stay for years, customers don’t just buy capacity, they buy stability and hard-earned know-how. 

Then we zoom in on advanced manufacturing and engineering capability. The Costa Rica team is solving customer problems with automation, inspection methodologies, testing support, and DFX thinking like design for manufacturability and design for test, backed by Lean Six Sigma discipline. We also get into the ecosystem that makes scaling possible: relationships with government, academia, and technical schools, plus what customers say when they visit for the first time. 

If you care about nearshoring, Costa Rica electronics manufacturing, high-reliability supply chains, or how to build a world-class culture in production, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with the biggest takeaway you’re applying next.

EMS@C-Level is hosted by global inspection leaders Koh Young (https://www.kohyoung.com) and Global Electronics Association (https://www.electronics.org)

You can see video versions of all of the EMS@C-Level pods on our YouTube playlist.