Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1116895
110 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2019 in the transportation business to upgrade IPC standards. Now, you're seeing automotive and transportation addendums, such as IPC-6012, which is a board standard, as well as IPC-A-610 and J-STD-001, which are assembly standards. Now, we have input from all other markets as well. They're all part of IPC's Task Groups Asia, which is working on adapting these stan- dards to meet these requirements. The domes- tic high-reliability market has realized that IPC standards are at the forefront of this. Eventu- ally, the GB standards will catch up. Histori- cally, IEC and GB standards have taken a lot of technology from what's been developed by IPC groups and adopted it to their standards. Rather than waiting, they've chosen to be pro- active, adopt it now, and then work internally in the GB system to move that into their inter- nal documents. And we're happy to do that. We want to get as much input from as many different industries as we can. Yu: That's interesting the Chinese train com- pany wants to work with IPC. Neves: They do. GB standards are domestically developed. Our technical team has worked on some GB committees as well because the prob- lem with international standards is that they have to be translated into Chinese. If you adopt an English standard, then you have to trans- late it. Each industry has its own language, per se, because since Chinese is an old language, it doesn't have a lot of relevant technical terms in it, so it's hard to find the right translator to translate the English technical standards into Chinese standards. And that's where IPC's Task Groups Asia has come in. They've taken tech - nical experts from the Chinese industry and put them in at the ground floor of the documents. Instead of having a translation after the fact, translations are an ongoing part of the devel- opment process. I chaired the IEC's PCB test- ing committee for 15 years, having to translate English documents into French, Russian, and other languages. While I was there, I became much better at writing English standards and using words that were easily translated into other languages. That's now coming into IPC documents because people who speak other languages are asking what things mean. When I'd look at the English version, I'd say, "I know what it means, but it wasn't well said in the document," so we would wordsmith it. Now, we're writing documents in a format that's easier to translate into other languages. Yu: Back in 2003, you had just moved to serve the local market. When you look back, was this the plan all along? Neves: When I looked at the China market and decided to open a business here, unlike most people who wanted to take advantage of the low cost and exporting things out of China, I came in to service the domestic market. Five years ago, 98% of our business was just China, and that was on purpose. Because of our exper- tise in the Asia market, we've seen an influx of business coming to us externally. That prob- ably makes up 8–9% of our business coming in from outside of China because we've estab- lished ourselves as a world leader. We receive stuff from Europe and other places as well for some of the specialty things that we do better than anyone else in the world. But the goal has always been to service the local market locally because you can't service the Chinese market from outside of China; it's almost impossible. The one thing I've learned from all of my years since coming here in the '80s is that China is a very unique place. Ev- erything runs a little bit differently, so unless you're fully here and integrated, you cannot run a successful business from outside. And the market caught up with us. When we first arrived, we were a service business. Nobody understood, and they would ask us what we made. When I'd say, "We don't make any- thing," they didn't understand our service- We want to get as much input from as many different industries as we can.