FAQ

Conversance Inc., founded by Joseph Chen, who previously worked out of the CTO office at Blackberry, is building a new e.commerce platform. To-date, ZTEST has funded the completion work on the Conversance “Chronicle” platform, and ZTEST presently owns 25.29% of Conversance.

ZTEST believes that Conversance is uniquely qualified to succeed, because it has a core development team that was (i) an important part of the Blackberry technology development, (ii) also gained invaluable business experience from holding key positions that helped drive sales growth from $30 million to $18 Billion over 14 years.  Just as they helped create the cellular industry, they are now creating the next commerce platform that could host up to a thousand or more Apps, running on top of the Conversance “distributed ledger” network.

World wide e.commerce sales were $2.3 Trillion dollars in 2017 and forecasted to reach $4.8 Trillion in 2021. By developing a platform that enables more secure, and simplified commerce and payment solutions for B2B; B2C; and C2C customers, Conversance has created an opportunity for strong growth in sales and profits. This is the market sector that Conversance is positioning itself to be a leader in.

Permatech Electronics is a wholly owned subsidiary of ZTEST Electronics Inc. and is an ISO-9001:2015 certified Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) provider founded in 1982. Permatech’s offerings include Materials Management, Printed Circuit Board (PCB) Assembly, Testing and Design services. Permatech operates from a 20,000 square foot facility in North York, Ontario, Canada. The company serves customers in the Medical, Power, Computer, Telecommunication, Wireless, Industrial and Consumer Electronics markets requiring high quality, quick-turn, small and medium size production runs.

As a developer and manufacturer of electronic test equipment, ZTEST had outsourced assembly projects to a number of vendors, one of them being Permatech, whose performance had been impressive. Permatech's ISO-9001:2015 certified facility was also a valuable asset to ZTEST, as it helps to differentiate EMS providers particularly in the small to mid-sized run category. For Permatech, the next level of growth as an EMS provider necessitated a transition to more turnkey business, a transition that required additional expertise and access to capital. ZTEST's public company status and test services background addressed both needs.

A printed circuit board (PCB) is an insulating surface with conductive material deposited in continuous paths from terminal-to-terminal. Electronic components are then mounted on the board in the assembly process.

Permatech falls into the PCB assembly provider category, which is often confused with the manufacturers who fabricate printed circuit boards, for example, Circuit World.

The fabricators produce the boards themselves, which are in turn purchased by OEMs or EMS assembly providers performing procurement services on behalf of their OEM customers. The assembly providers or OEM customers then purchase the electronic or RF components such as chips, resistors etc. to be mounted on the printed circuit board. Once the assembly has been completed, the board with all attached components can be delivered back to the customer to be placed into its enclosure, or housing.

Permatech currently offers full surface-mount and through-hole capability. Through-hole (sometimes called "pin-through-hole") was the prevailing manufacturing method for PCB assembly until roughly 5 - 7 years ago, and is basically the practice of mounting components on the board by inserting the component's leads through holes. The limitation of Through-hole manufacturing is that the maximum density of components is constrained by the amount of board space allocated to the holes and secondly, the speed of placement is restricted by the component size and mounting process. Surface mount allows for a much higher density of components along with decreased costs and increased speed. Despite the advantages of surface mount technology, through-hole is still the method of choice in some applications. The company recently purchased additional assembly equipment from Siemens and DEK Printing Machines Ltd, adding full Ball Grid Array and Micro-Ball Grid Array placement capability.