About Elektronikpraxis

Elektronikpraxis

Elektronikpraxis — "Das professionelle Elektronikmagazin" — is one of Germany's leading industrial-electronics magazines, published biweekly from Würzburg by the Vogel Communications Group. Founded in 1966 as a sister magazine of Elektroteknik, it has served electronics professionals for six decades with practice-oriented coverage of hardware development, embedded software engineering, component procurement, electronics manufacturing, and management — from the age of discrete components to the era of embedded intelligence. As the publication arm of the Fachverband Elektronik-Design e.V. (FED), the professional association for electronics design, it holds a unique institutional position in the industry, combining independent trade journalism with the association's professional network. Its online portal elektronikpraxis.de extends the print offering into a cross-media information service.

Overview

Elektronikpraxis appears every two weeks — 24 issues per year plus special issues — as a practice-focused magazine for the electronics industry. Its target audience, in the publisher's words, comprises all professionals who develop, produce, and distribute electronics nationally and internationally: development engineers, production specialists, component buyers, and technical managers. The editorial promise is utility: specialists and executives receive, through the magazine's cross-media channels, its special issues and reports, events, and the online portal, content that delivers concrete solutions for daily tasks.

The practice orientation distinguishes Elektronikpraxis from more academically inclined engineering journals: articles address the engineer's daily work — selecting components, designing hardware, programming embedded systems, organizing production, managing projects. The magazine reports biweekly on current events as well as new products, technologies, and development methods, keeping readers current in an industry where product cycles are measured in months and yesterday's component choice determines tomorrow's production risk.

A defining institutional feature is the magazine's role as the publication branch (Publikationsorgan) of the Fachverband Elektronik-Design e.V. (FED), the German professional association for electronics design. This gives the title a direct line to the organized design community — the engineers, service providers, and companies that form the profession's backbone — and makes it, in part, the association's journal. Editorial offices are maintained in Munich and Würzburg, reflecting the magazine's roots in both the Bavarian capital's electronics cluster and the publisher's Würzburg headquarters.

History

Elektronikpraxis was founded in 1966 in West Germany as a sister magazine of Elektroteknik, the Vogel publishing house's electrotechnical journal. The timing placed it at the beginning of the electronics industry's great expansion: integrated circuits were entering industrial use, automation was transforming manufacturing, and German industry needed a professional medium for the engineers building the electronic age. The magazine's practice-oriented concept — written for the working engineer rather than the researcher — proved durable across six decades of technological revolutions, from discrete components through microprocessors to embedded AI.

The publisher's own history frames the magazine's. The Vogel publishing house, founded in the 19th century and re-established in Coburg in 1947 after expropriation in the Soviet occupation zone, grew into one of Germany's largest B2B publishers — describing itself in 1933 as the country's largest specialist-magazine publisher with 23 titles, and surviving war, division, and reunification. The Würzburg-based Vogel Communications Group today employs around 790 people with revenues of about 104 million euros (2021), producing over 100 print media, web portals, and business events across some 20 companies and participations in twelve countries, with focuses on the German-speaking market, Eastern Europe, and Asia.

Within this portfolio, Elektronikpraxis became one of the flagship electronics titles. The FED relationship — the magazine as the association's publication branch — deepened the title's professional anchoring: where other B2B magazines serve an audience, Elektronikpraxis serves a membership, with the loyalty and the editorial accountability that implies. The digital transformation brought the elektronikpraxis.de portal and a deliberate "user-centered" relaunch of the online offering, with editorial topic selection informed by reader comments, search-term analysis, and website analytics — the classic B2B evolution from print periodical to data-driven cross-media brand.

Coverage and Content

The editorial spectrum covers the full electronics value chain from the engineer's perspective. Hardware-development coverage addresses circuit design, component selection, PCB layout, and the design tools engineers use daily. Embedded-software-engineering coverage follows the firmware and software stacks that increasingly define electronic products — from real-time operating systems to the security of connected devices. Component-procurement coverage serves the buyers: market developments, distributor strategies, availability and lifecycle management — the supply-chain intelligence that became critical during the chip shortages of the early 2020s.

Electronics-manufacturing coverage addresses production technology: SMT assembly, test strategies, quality management, and the contract-manufacturing industry. Management coverage speaks to the technical executive: project management, innovation strategy, and the business of electronics development. Special issues and reports dive deep into focus topics, while the events program convenes the community in person.

The FED connection shapes parts of the agenda: professional-development topics, design methodology, and the concerns of electronics-design service providers receive dedicated attention. The biweekly rhythm keeps the coverage current — new-product reports, technology analyses, and industry news arrive while they're still actionable. The tone throughout is practical and solution-oriented: the magazine's self-understanding is that of a tool for the working engineer, not a showcase for the industry — a working instrument that earns its place on the lab bench issue after issue.

Organization and Ownership

Elektronikpraxis is published by the Vogel Communications Group GmbH & Co. KG, headquartered in Würzburg — one of Germany's leading providers of specialist communication, with core businesses in agency services (automated communication, corporate publishing, social-media services, PR) and specialist media. The group's specialist-media portfolio includes titles such as Automobil Industrie, MM MaschinenMarkt, MM Logistik, kfz-betrieb, konstruktionspraxis, IT-Business, Elektronikpraxis, Process, elektrotechnik, and Laborpraxis, plus the information services of the IWW Institute. The group is led by Matthias Bauer (chairman), Dennis Hirthammer, and Günter Schürger.

The magazine serves as the publication branch of the Fachverband Elektronik-Design e.V. (FED), the professional association for electronics design — an institutional relationship that defines its position in the market. The editor was most recently reported as Johann Wiesböck; current editorial leadership is not publicly confirmed in the accessible sources. Circulation was reported at 46,360 copies in the second quarter of 2006 (IVW); current figures are not publicly confirmed. The ISSN is 0341-5589.

Digital Presence

The online portal elektronikpraxis.de complements the print magazine as what the publisher calls a "Business Efficiency Portal" — additional information to the printed material, organized for the working engineer's information needs. A relaunch strengthened the user-centeredness of the online offering: editors use reader comments, search-term analyses, and web analytics alongside journalistic instinct for topic selection, and the advertising offering was optimized in parallel — readers, the publisher's research found, accept advertising as the price of free use, particularly when it stays close to the content's themes.

The portal covers hardware development, embedded software engineering, component procurement, electronics manufacturing, and management in the electronics industry, with daily news complementing the biweekly print rhythm. A magazine app and media library extend the offering to mobile and on-demand formats, meeting engineers where they work — on the lab bench, the production floor, and the commute between them. For a B2B engineering medium, the digital strategy centers on professional utility: the searchable archive, product information, and event services serve engineers who need reliable technical information in their daily work. The FED association's digital channels complement the magazine's own, reinforcing the title's role as the organized design community's information hub — a position built over six decades of continuous publication and defended through every wave of media disruption.