Our journey began 1988 in the black forest, when entrepreneur Klaus Jacob founded JCB, settling into the German automotive industry with a mindset based on quality and reliability. After 13 years of JCB, Klaus eventually met Guenther Hoeft, who together founded the company CML in 2001, quickly expanding the business on an international level, by setting up our first Hong Kong office in 2005, a move that allowed us to strengthen the relationship with our suppliers.

Though, this global expansion was not possible without Daniel Jacob and Moritz Hoeft, the sons of Klaus and Guenther, who joined the company in 2003. With their vision for a global set-up, offices in Shenzhen, Paris and Mexico City soon followed. With Daniel’s 2009 move to Hong Kong, a legal separation took place in which Moritz completely took over all CML companies in Europe. Daniel saw an opportunity to further strengthen our supply chain in Asia, this resulted in Daniel setting up an independent fast-growing organization in Hong Kong which has since then been acting as a partner company to the CML Group in Europe. This led to the two partners Daniel and Moritz, who by this point had taken over their fathers’ roles, to develop our European and Asian business simultaneously.

At this point CML was mainly in the business of PCB trading, but this trend was about to change, with s.m.a.r.t., founded in 2009. Based in Shenzhen we provided our own prototypes under German quality standards thus being able to provide a full range of services to our customers for the first time, something that we worked hard to continue thanks to Daniels vision to turn CML into a global PCB manufacturer.