Kemikon
Assembly Line
🇲🇾 Malaysia: the surprise winner from US-China chip wars
As companies around the world look for a back-up to China to protect themselves from geopolitical disruptions — a strategy known as China plus one — Malaysia is becoming a surprise investment destination. It has a 50-year history in the “back end” of the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain: packaging, assembling and testing chips. But it has ambitions to move up to the front end of a $520bn global industry that powers everything from televisions to smartphones and electric vehicles. That includes higher value activities such as wafer fabrication and integrated circuit design.
Developing Malaysia’s semiconductor industry and workforce into this higher value manufacturing is a “critical goal,” says prime minister Anwar Ibrahim in an interview with the Financial Times.