If Taiwan is seen as the most important semiconductor chip manufacturing country in the world today, Malaysia is not far behind as a large number of global semiconductor chip design companies such as AMD, Intel, Micron and others use our country as a hub for packaging processing, memory and storage chips on a global scale.
There are also a number of local companies that also have such expertise that have global clients who use their services to package their semiconductor chips for the international market. In fact, the industry is seen as large enough that we have a consortium called the Malaysia Advanced Packaging Consortium (MAPC).
To help further develop this industry and increase the number of professional workers in the industry, the government has provided research and development (R&D) grants worth RM92 million under the Malaysia Science Endowment (MSE) program and MoUs that have been signed with five local semiconductor packaging companies.
Semiconductor Chips
The companies are SkyeChip Bhd, Inari Technology Sdn Bhd, FusionAP Sdn Bhd, Pentamaster Instrumentation Sdn Bhd and NSW Automation Sdn Bhd. The grant given by the government has also been matched by the local packaging industry with its own grant worth RM93.8 million, making the total value worth about RM185.8 million.
Apart from research and development of new technologies, the grant will also be used to carry out a 24-month program as a platform to increase the competitiveness of workers and expose them to the latest technologies needed in this industry.
The memorandum of understanding was signed during the SEMICON SEA 2026 event which took place last week, and shows the government's confidence in the development of this industry as one of the pillars of the country's economy.
In fact, with this initiative, the government expects that these five companies will be able to control seven percent of the global semiconductor chip packaging sector by 2035.
Datuk Chang Lih Kang, Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation said that Malaysia's 50 years of experience in the semiconductor chip development and packaging industry, together with its neutral political stance between China and Taiwan, make Malaysia an ideal country for various semiconductor chip manufacturing companies to send components here for assembly.
