Surface mount component placement machines are widely used in electronic manufacturing industry for automated placement of components on printed circuit boards. In this paper, we propose a new approach to the component placement problem using high speed turret style chip shooter machine and investigate the case of one single machine and one board type case with the objective of minimizing the assembly (cycle) time per board. The proposed method first groups the component types that can be processed at the same machine speed. Then the minimum spanning tree technique is employed to perform feeder duplications, reducing the distance effect between components of each type. Finally, a genetic-based algorithm with 2-opt local search using feeder arrangement list as solution representation is applied to determine the component placement sequence. Our experimental results indicate that the algorithm produces satisfactory solutions when a lower bound on cycle time per board is used as the evaluation criterion. It is also shown that the overuse of feeder duplication will produce a negative effect on the cycle time. Finally, the algorithm can help management to make a production plan that takes both component inventory cost and cycle time into consideration.