Never before had we expected that SEMICON SEA 2020 would go virtual.
The COVID-19 crisis abruptly halted our ability to hold our premier Southeast Asia electronics manufacturing exposition as we typically do – in the physical realm. The pandemic tested our adaptability, challenged our willingness to experiment and, perhaps above all, accelerated not only our own but the world’s digital transformation. We had to change our way of doing business and learn to connect virtually like we had never had before.
SEMI continues to believe that virtual interaction is no replacement for face-to-face engagement. But, like the rest of the world, we fast-tracked our digital education and staged the virtual event 20 July to 21 August 2020 to gather supply chain players and help fulfill the tremendous potential of our great industry. For all the suffering the COVID-19 has caused, the pandemic has underscored one important truth – that we need innovation to help solve the world’s greatest problems now more than ever.
We thank all our event sponsors as we turned what started as a grand experiment into a successful event that drew nearly 3,000 attendees to our webinars, business matching sessions and other online offerings designed to help them uncover new business opportunities. Following are other highlights.
Southeast Asia Pavilion at Virtual SEMICON West 2020
In our first collaboration with SEMICON West, our Southeast Asia Pavilion at the event welcomed virtual visitors from around the globe to help them form new connections and grow their businesses.
Business Matching Sessions
Technical buyers from more than 15 multinational companies along with 141 pre-qualified suppliers attended more than 50 meetings across four online business matching sessions.
Technical Webinars
Company representatives from regions including Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan, the United States, the UK, Israel, China and Japan shared their expertise and industry insights at SEMICON Southeast Asia 2020 webinars. In addition, experts from leading semiconductor companies such as Micron Semiconductor Asia Operations, ViTrox Corporation Berhad and A*STAR took part in our technical exchange by sharing the latest trends in the rapidly evolving semiconductor industry.
Talent Development: Inspirational University Program Talks
Higher learning education will progressively have to be skills based and education will become more interdisciplinary. Through the engaging and lively interaction to inspire STEM learning, we are glad that both Lam Research and GLOBALFOUNDRIES have receives a satisfactory level of recruitment leads. More than 750 students are majority from Malaysia & Singapore universities hopped online recently to attend Inspiration Talk, the SEMI SEA’s first webinar. The students learned about the industry’s impact on the future of tech and available career paths and discovered how to take advantage of the SEMI’s university programs. They also exploring available job opportunities.
The SEMICON Southeast Asia teams extends its tremendous thanks to sponsors and attendees for their support. As we all navigate the pandemic and hope in the near future to awaken to a brighter day, we will continue to connect virtually and, whenever possible, in person as the semiconductor industry evolves and flourishes.
In the meantime, we will all continue to pull together to support our resilient industry outperforms most other manufacturing sectors. Semiconductor capital equipment shipments were up 23% globally in the second quarter of 2020 versus the same period in 2019 and semiconductor chip growth remains in positive territory.
Our team has already started planning for SEMICON SEA 2021, scheduled to take place at the Setia Spice Arena & Convention Centre in Penang, 18-20 May 2021.
We look forward to seeing soon you as we continue to strengthen the microelectronics ecosystem!
Stay well and engaged.
Thank you!