Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1447212
52 SMT007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2022 expanding, but to keep up with the demand is a major challenge. Matties: How are the customers handling the price increases? Ghalili: Some customers understand, every- body knows the price of components, as they are readily available. An intelligent customer understands what is happening in the market and they're willing to work with you. Matties: In the U.S., we're having a hard time finding people to take the jobs. Is there a trend in China, like the U.S., where people aren't wanting necessarily to work, or is it more job- hopping? Ghalili: In China, we don't have much prob- lem with finding or maintaining the labor. It's nothing like our facility in Fremont [Califor- nia], where finding and keeping employees has become a challenge. In China, we are finding and maintaining our workforce, but salaries are on the rise, and we expect it to continue. Matties: Where do you see this headed? Do you see a plateau in the wage increases or do you see a sustained rate of increase? Ghalili: I think it will plateau in China. In the past 15 years, we were seeing 15–20% pay increases. It's starting to plateau around 4–6%. In our industry, we've been a bit on the upper end, running around 6% and anticipating the same next year. e U.S. is a completely different mar- ket where the difficulty is just in finding the labor force. Engineers are hard to find, and the demand for the engineering and technical field is very high. Labor cost increase is a constant struggle we are having in both the U.S. and China. We are trying to see how much we can leverage each facility, for example, the engineers here (in China) supporting the engineers in the United States. We want to build synergy between the two companies in supporting each other. Matties: How are we ultimately going to solve this engineering gap problem? Ghalili: I see two areas we need to address to bridge the gap. In China, especially, we are bringing in more people right out of college, training and building them up. In the U.S., we are looking at it from a couple of different per- spectives; besides the traditional training, we are leveraging our China engineering team to bridge the gap in the U.S. In China, we've set up a semi-control room, where our process engineers will log into all the equipment in the United States and support them in running the machines in the United States. We have people coming in late at night in China to work with our team in the United States, supporting them in running the oper- ation on that side. I can see that happening globally where we are going to leverage people from different areas supporting each other. I can see engineers in India supporting and run- ning operations in China and or in the United Foad Ghalili