Maurice Lee, a senior consultant of Unimicron Technology Corporation and the chairman of the 11th Board of TPCA, was interviewed by TCPA Quarterly for the first time after the election to share TPCA’s operations and the challenges to the PCB industry in his previous term and his new missions and expectations in the new term. In the next three years, Chairman Lee will make “member cohesion, industry competitiveness enhancement, and sustainable new value” and “high-value, low-carbon PCB industry for Taiwan” his main goals during his term.

        He took the previous term at the outbreak of the US-China trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic three years ago. While the latter greatly impacted the global economy and industry, TCPA thus made various service adjustments in response. These adjustments included the creation of the “Taiwan International Electronics Manufacturing Show” to integrate five individual industrial shows and integration of various TPCA events, such as exhibitions, marketing, TPCA annual congress, training, seminars, and others with the innovative O2O model. In industry promotion, Chairman Lee introduced the “Taiwan PCB Industry Circular Economy Development Strategy”, “Advice for Taiwan’s PCB Industry”, and “Taiwan PCB Industry Advanced Technology Development Roadmap” for the industry in the past three years to capture key issues at different stages in order to plan advance planning and deployment and for the TPCA to actively link policy resources to promote industry-government-academia-research collaboration. Chairman Lee especially thanks the government for their concerns about the PCB industry and the support and concerted efforts of all members, volunteer teams, and employees to promote the healthy growth of Taiwan’s PCB industry.

        In 2021, Taiwan’s PCB industry chain created a domestic and overseas combined production value of NT$1.29 trillion, a new high in history. While global economic growth has been challenged by various factors in recent years, such as geopolitics, pandemic, emission limitations and power curtailments of mainland China, chip shortages, Russo-Ukrainian War, lockdown measures, and inflations, according to Chairman Lee, although the PCB industry is still promising in the end, he pointed out 8 key issues facing the short-, medium-, and long-term difficulties and challenges in the future: (1) keen competitions among Asia Pacific PCB manufacturers; (2) over-centralization of production bases; (3) inadequate self-sufficiency of key equipment and materials; (4) instead of slogans, the circular economy and sustainable safety have become the requirements for business operations; (5) linking semiconductor and advanced ecosystems for PCB industrial reengineering; (6) smart manufacturing X information security protection; (7) talents and workforces; and (8) the importance of factory positioning.

        While net zero emissions and industrial transformation and upgrading are the most important among these 8 key issues, Chairman Lee emphasized that net zero emissions is already a global trend, and there is no exception for the PCB industry. Besides starting with factory carbon reduction, supply chain carbon reduction is the next step. It is thus necessary for the government’s early completion of renewable energy infrastructure in order to secure the global supply chain position. In terms of transformation into an advanced, high-value industry, Chairman Lee shared some ideas and strategies as the strategic direction for the upgrading of the PCB industry and the direction for the future efforts of the industry, government, academia, and research: (1) promoting a technology central platform; (2) forming an industry alliance to promote the horizontal and vertical alliances of PCB manufacturers and materials and equipment suppliers to break through the technological bottlenecks through division of labor; (3) promoting a technology verification platform to accelerate the realization of efficiency; (4) developing measures for the net zero emissions of the PCB industry; (5) announcing the advanced technology roadmap to integrate the resources of the industry, government, academia, and research to accelerate R&D with the support of digital transformation and smart manufacturing in order to achieve supply localization, independent development of advanced technologies, and net zero emissions through the concerted efforts of all parts of society.

        One person runs fast, and a group of people travels far. Hence, TPCA will proactively collaborate with the Taoyuan City Government under the “Taiwan PCB Industry High-Value, Low-Carbon Transformation Project”, come to a consensus with the central government to include the PCB industry in major government projects, hoping to establish a high-value, low-carbon demonstration site in Taoyuan City by teaming up with the semiconductor industry to develop the high-value, low-carbon ecosystem for the semiconductor and PCB industries in Taoyuan and Hsinchu and thereby assist with the transformation of PCB manufacturers and deploy next-generation competitiveness for the PCB industry. Chairman Lee is expecting to go forward and grow with members in order to enhance the overall competitiveness of the PCB industry and realize the vision of sustainable and high-value transformation at a steady pace.