Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/457216
62 The PCB Magazine • February 2015 believe they were not organized. They were all happening simultaneously, at the same type of targets, carrying pre-made banners; if you look closely at the news videos you will see people in the crowds with microphones and so forth co- ordinating the whole thing. The Chinese must look at us and say, "And you were talking about our little demonstration?" We're worlds apart and they think we're headed towards becom- ing a Third World country, and that they're fast moving to a first world position. Barry: Well, bringing it back to the PCB in- dustry, it's all about automation, automation, automation. Hamed: Absolutely, if you don't have automa- tion and you are going into automation, it will have an effect on your ability to sell. These people need to make money, and the other issue is that in China the increase in salaries of factory workers is mandated by the government. So if you look at the last few years, the salaries have increased 20% a year, and more than a 100% increase in the last five years. If business continues to go to China, that'll force companies to automate, and they'll have to start getting rid of these workers. The government is also mandating things with regard to social costs, health care and things like that, which people here didn't have before. Now all of these factors are coming in to add cost. It is now cheaper for you to get a senior level engineer in Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam than it is one here in China. So, how soon before people say, "Hey, maybe we need to move…"? Lionel: It does also require innovation. We can't keep using the same old technology. We have to have, for example, better and more efficient ways of transferring data to the substrates. You have to be able to provide the quality that's needed at the substrate level, because as you drive the geom- etries down, the incidence of fails and defects goes up. Unless you innovate in that area, you›re not going to get the yields you need to provide the products at the prices we need. Gene: This leads to the newest generation of opportunity for actual equipment. As we are all now working with the cloud, we now have the fog coming, which is local and regional ver- sions of the cloud where you can extract infor- mation locally where you need it, instantly, and then put it back. And that's going to create an- other whole industry of electronic arts as well as software. Hamed: There is one other area which people don't even talk about, and it's even complicated for me to talk about it here, but it's the massive amounts of corruption, even within our indus - try. People want to sweep this under the rug, and you can sweep it under the rug all day long, but only the other day we were sitting here talking to one of the very top companies in all of China. They were saying how they know what's going on even within their own company and they just look the other way. Of course, we know that the Chinese government is addressing it, but the government is addressing it at the government level and they haven't even started to do this at the business level, and it is a very serious prob - lem. They have just put under house arrest or in jail 50,000 government employees—that's a huge number and that's just scratching the surface. You can imagine how high that num- ber would be in business. As a public company, it's not in our DNA to even think about things like that, but when you deal with it on a daily basis we are forced to walk away from order after order. The way people are getting that business is because of that. This is different than the West. China is going to have to learn a very hard les - son sooner or later. Gene: Wouldn't it be nice if in America, we followed the rule of law that we talk about and put under house arrest 50,000 government em- ployees that are corrupt? (Laughs) Barry: The thing that is interesting, though, is the rate at which technology is changing and how we're going to start applying circuits. In my mind, 3D is something that is really going change everything. Gene: Well, that takes away a lot of the circuit boards though. About 3–4% of the surface of a circuit board has already converted to packaging for the past year of what would have been circuit interview CHINA OUTLOOK continues