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70 PCB007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2025 My personal connection to China began with three days of R&R on the beach in Kaohsiung, Tai- wan, in 1969, on my way back from Vietnam. Many years later, you can appreciate the irony of my hav- ing dinner with the engineers of Boashung Steel in Shanghai and them declaring me a "comrade" as they also fought the Vietnamese, and their fathers fought the Japanese. Mystery Systems When I became involved with the Chinese nearly 45 years ago, I read an article about the "mystery systems of the East" that contrasted Eastern vs. Western cultures in history, religion, philosophy, language, government, law, education, and geog- raphy. These fundamental observations were very helpful to me as I began working with Chinese com- panies. As U.S. companies have moved their opera- tions overseas to China and Southeast Asia during the past few decades, we have all become more familiar with the Eastern perspective and way of looking at life and business. Will these perspectives begin to dominate the world's production of PWBs, and will it be to our benefit? Working for the World's Largest PCB Manufacturer Until 2008, my work experience was mostly lim- ited to Taiwan, where I had lived for many years, working for Hewlett-Packard. I also lived in Hong Kong before its return to China in 1997. In 2008, my HP boss from Taiwan, who had been promoted as the executive vice president of Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn), asked me to become the CTO of Foxconn's components division, which made all the connectors, cables, flex, and PCB multilayers. He even sent me a 150-slide PowerPoint presenta- tion about the division. To say I was flabbergasted is an understatement. Foxconn PCB had five sites in China, all built after 2006, with 17 facilities of 1 million square feet each. Of those four plants, Huai'an alone produced over 18 million square feet of an average eight-layer mul- tilayer board every month. The entire captive man- ufacturing was eight times the size of the known largest PCB manufacturer in the world (a Japanese giant). Foxconn's largest site, 300 km north of Bei- jing (where the Great Wall begins), had six enor- mous plants and 30 more planned, making it the largest in the world. I was tasked with improving efficiency, yields, and profits over the next three years so Foxconn could launch an IPO for the PCB unit. Fundamental PWB Infrastructure Advantages In my experience, the Chinese have many infrastruc- ture advantages over the Western world, including: 1. Long-term business planning and vision to drive strategic focus. 2. Access to low-cost, vast technical resources and manpower in engineering. 3. Belief in organic growth through added capacity, not by acquisitions, including verti- calization of the supply chain. 4. Connections to financial backing (bank- ing and investors) that also shares the same vision of growth and market share over prof- its—overseas Chinese banking, not China's banking system. 5. Cooperation of government research labora- tories to develop and promote new materials, processes, and technologies. 6. Innovative use of the world's best ideas, equipment, and processes. Challenges for the Chinese Despite this, I've observed that China does have its own set of difficulties to work through. I'll list a few that come to mind. H A P PY 'S T EC H TA L K # 4 4 H o n g Ko n g 1 9 97 ▼