How much should one pay for a chip or a component? Lytica, a Canadian supply-chain pricing analytics company, has the answer. Founded by former Nortel chief procurement officer Ken Bradley, who, like many others in the IT industry, was once bemused by component pricing, Lytica is transforming itself into a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, helping OEM and EMS make well-informed deals when buying or selling.Digitimes recently had a talk with Bradley about the value that business intelligence, such as pricing information and well-thought-out planning, can bring to a company.Q: I guess many OEMs have used Lytica's services when deciding what components to use. What inspired you to create this company that offers such a unique service?A: I spent many years at Nortel Networks, managed to negotiate for some joint ventures for Nortel in Guangdong province in China and in Shanghai, and founded Lytica after I retired from Nortel. My background was semiconductor physics and developing components. After I helped Nortel set up some joint ventures in China, they made me chief procurement officer. I was brand-new in purchasing, leading 1,600 people around the world, doing buying, sourcing, negotiating, and component engineering. What I discovered was that nobody knew how much I should be paying for a component.At the time Nortel was growing really quickly. I think we had the largest market capitalization in the world at that time. My suppliers and my staff told me I had the best pricing in the world. I sent a circuit card, with all the components on it, to suppliers, or EMS, like Flextronics or Sanmina, and I would get back a card with prices for its materials and components. Many of those prices were cheaper than I was paying! So I asked my staff: "Yesterday you told me I had the best pricing in the world! How did this happen?" They would not know. It turns out no body knows. Pricing is a private and secret kind of thing. It is not necessarily confidential, but nobody would share their pricing because they think it is their strategic advantage. This really bothered me. I even went to good consulting firms. But after charging me like US$100,000, they would tell me, "Ken you got really good prices." They didn't know, either.When I retired, I formed Lytica in 2005 as a consulting company. Because we are not suppliers, I got to see what people paid for components. I thought: Wouldn't that be great if we can set up a new product line in Lytica? We can gather all the prices from companies that we dealt with. They would share their pricing, and Lytica could statistically analyze where each price fits in the ranking of each component.Q: What was your methodology?A: The idea is to tell how good somebody's spending on electronic components is compared to market. Lytica predicts when something doesn't seem to fit. For example, one company's prices on a component may rank the 10th position most of the time, but for specific parts and components they ranked at the 30th. Lytica would advise them to negotiate prices consistent with the 10th position for those specific parts and components. And 80% of the time they would get prices close to what we suggested. So, the method has proven to work.Lytica founded this service because everybody is having the same problem of not knowing how much they should pay for the same component. People think they have good pricing just like I did while I was at Nortel, but there is always opportunity.Lytica started doing this, and the database grew bigger and bigger to be the largest in the world of this type. So we hired more staff and came up with different ways of doing the modelling. The reality is, our model is based on the prices people are actually paying, and not by crawling on the web. We formed statistical distribution diagrams, knowing all the prices of the same components used by all companies in Lytica's database. When you come back with a price from a supplier, we can see where you fit in the ranking of that component's distribution, and if it's an outlier in your basket of components, Lytica recommends a price appropriate for you to renegotiate.Q: But there are so many factors that can influence the price.A: Yes. There are big companies and small companies. There are companies which are good negotiators, and those that are poor negotiators. Or those which have great business processes versus those that have not. And high volumes and low volumes. We counted some 60 factors that can influence the price, including freight, volume, channel mark-up, payment-terms, commodity spend and not so obvious factors such as financial risk, inventory reservation levels and geography, etc.There is no way you can come up with an equation for people to do something like price analysis. It is easier to calculate the cost, but that is not true for price. Market demand, negotiating skills, tariffs… you can list all of the things that would affect price. But it turns out cost has no correlation with price. You cannot figure out the price with all those 60 factors, either. Take weather for example, people have not come up with a perfect way to predict weather which needs fewer variables. So it is impossible to try using a bottom-up way of calculating the price. By characterizing how you perform in a marketplace Lytica takes it into account all of the things that you do such as being a skilled negotiator, having a good business practices, and all those other things you do. This characterization use statistical distributions to analyze what you're buying.All a customer needs to do is to give us their list of component pricings using a template. They can achieve great savings because we identify components that, for some reason, the prices are not normal for them. Our clients love this because that saves them time and money.Let me give you an example from the Nortel days. We were purchasing a strip of special metal which is about an inch wide and six inch long. Our development price from the supplier was US$1,100. When it went into production, nobody changed the price. Nortel was buying thousands and thousands of these things at the price which was supposed to be for new product introduction. Lytica is able to find those problems right away.Q: How can component and parts manufacturers in Taiwan or EMS companies make Lytica their tool to improve their operations?A: We started with many OEMs as customers because we didn't think the contract manufacturers would like our service as they're selling parts. But EMS do a lot of buying for the OEMs. Now EMS people come to Lytica, saying, "You've got to help us." Their customers demanded a lower price for components because they feel they are paying too much, but EMS have both sides of the equation. They have both the buy side and sell side problems. They were not always getting the best prices themselves. They now are using Lytica to test their prices and make sure they are not charging too much to their customers. So for EMS, they have advantage on both sides using Lytica.Lytica has more OEM customers than EMS. But EMS is the largest single market segment that we have, representing 30-35% of our businesses. Our smallest customer has US$5 million in sales a year, and the largest is among the largest corporations in the Fortune 500 or Global 2000 list. In terms of verticals, we've got customers from computer, automotive, medical, Internet of Things (IoT), etc. We are well-represented on the high end, and our goal is to capture the other 180,000 companies out there using electronic components.Q: Are any of those customers from Asia?A: Most of our customers are US and European companies. Some of the computer companies are from Asia. Some are from Taiwan. Pretty much every customer we have sources somewhere from Asia or the rest of the world. It is hard to get electronic components not associated with China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam and Singapore.Q: How big is your team? Do you have offices in Asia?A: There are 25 people in the company and growing rapidly, and are all located in Ottawa, Canada. If we wanted to set up offices in Asia, Shenzhen, Taiwan and Shanghai would be great places to do that.Lytica uses technologies so that we don't need to have remote offices everywhere. One of the things we need to have in order to do this job properly, is to have information on componentry. Some companies have offices set up in India or China, with 300 people to do component engineering and manage data information. Lytica does this using artificial intelligence technology. Around 80% of our people have technical degrees, such as science and engineering, mathematics. Lytica has PhDs who've worked with technology and research organizations. We've got a good mix of older people with production and distribution experiences, and young people with skills in AI and data analytics. Our employees speak 18 different languages. The diversity of the company forced us to venture on solutions in different ways than the ones currently adopted in the market.What we've done with technology is to read documents and organize information by use of machines. We do very sophisticated modelling. That really cuts down on our need to have a lot of people doing those tasks. On the sales front we're growing fast. We have transitioned from being a traditional consulting company into a world class software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform company.Lytica is expanding our global presence with marketing and sales initiatives. Asia is an important area of focus and we're bringing in a lot of business leads from there. The majority of our leads come from Asia, Europe, and the US. Our customer profile looks like an inverted pyramid. Most of our customers are huge companies with revenues over US$5 billion a year, and some of them are in the world's largest market cap group. We've got a very good position, because we receive a lot of quality data from those customers, and the opportunity to grow with these data. As the roadmap goes forward, we are able to increase our capabilities and help them get better pricing and improve their processes.The data that our customers give us are confidential, and we do not disclose customers' names. Some customers would mention that they use our service, and some would not.Q: Efficiency seemed to be the golden rule before Covid-19. However, the pandemic sems to have shifted the attention towards supply chain resilience and risk diversification. How has the pandemic affected your business?A: When Covid hit, everybody tightened up, because nobody knew what the impact's going to be and how long to last. We saw our sales go down, and customers delayed spending. There was this six-month period that nobody knew what's going to happen. In the last three or four months, all of our customers have started buying again, and we got new customers at a tremendous rate as we changed to a SaaS model. We actually are having our third record quarters in a row.Your comment about efficiency is interesting. I think efficiency is still the golden rule. Companies still need efficiency, but the problem is, they're not quantifying risk adequately. As they have been hit with risk from a couple of sources - one is the pandemic, one is the trade tension, one is the semiconductor shortage - so they are demanding diversity and resilience. From my perspective, resilience is a result of well-thought-out processes. So the companies that are succeeding are the ones with the most solid practices. Many times, I see a company having to pay more, it is because they did not forecast well enough to be able to ensure the supply they needed. Or they did not have adequate thinking into their sourcing strategy. When you are good at business intelligence and planning, you are in better shape. When the world was short of capacitors in 2018, we saw some companies which were getting solid pricing and supplies. They were the ones with the best planning systems. Other companies which have "I will be able to negotiate when I need it" mindsets were paying prices that are 2-3-4 times than they should in premiums just to get components. It is the practices that are the root cause that drive diversity and resilience. Companies need to have appreciations for diversity and use Lytica's SaaS platform.Lytica chairman Ken BradleyPhoto: Company

Canada is the fourth largest vehicle exporting country in the world, making 2.1 million cars a year. And the country is keen to take its car industry to a new level. Last year, Canada's Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association (APMA) launched Project Arrow - an initiative for developing electric vehicles (EV).Digitimes recently talked to Warren Ali, SVP of innovation at APMA to learn more about Project Arrow and Canada's vision of future mobility.Q: It has been one year since APMA launched Project Arrow at CES 2020. But not many people are familiar with this project. Could you please introduce the reason for launching the project, and the goals that you are looking to achieve through the project?A: Let me walk you back with a bit of the background. The APMA is Canada's national association that represents automotive OEM producers of parts, equipment, tools, supplies and advanced technologies across Canada. This year is actually our 69th year.For the past five or six years, we have been focusing on demonstrative projects, using a vehicle as a platform, to showcase Canadian autonomous and connected technologies and applications. Both in terms of infotainment and smart cars, as well as cyber security, quantum encryption, and other things like LiDAR, and the system that has the cars interacting with the things around it.That was a very successful program, but for the factors that are driving the auto industry - connected, autonomous, electric, and shared - we didn't really have anything to showcase for electric cars, the new energy aspect. We have been using production line vehicles. While that is useful for showcasing autonomous and connected vehicles, you really cannot use it to showcase new EV technologies.So we thought, what better ways are there than building the electrical vehicles from the ground up? We can showcase many elements that are not on the market yet. Last year we launched Project Arrow, as an extension of what we've been doing in the autonomous and connected space. It really showcased zero-emission technology capabilities of Canada.At CES last year, we launched the initiative, basically divided into four phases. The first phase is design. We wanted it to embody some Canadian culture. So a competition's held across the country. We got dozens of submissions, and the winning design was from a team of four from a non-traditional industrial design school. And now we are on the second phase, which is RFP and engineering, core technology and components. We are building this concept car from ground up. Of course we need software, but we also need things like doors, windshield, tire, which are in the traditional space. So we recently kicked off the request for proposals (RFP) at CES 2021. It closes on March 1; so far we have over 200 companies registered to submit proposals. There are a whole host of products, applications and services we are sourcing. We have set up a portal site for Canadian companies which are interested in contributing by submitting their proposals and information, such as the area they are interested in participating.Q: So only Canadians can participate? Are companies of other countries able to join this project?A: We are here to showcase as much as we can of the Canadian EV/automotive ecosystems. And what I am saying by "Canadian" are companies which are operating and able to supply out of operations in Canada. We can source all kinds of things from all over the world, but the idea is that this vehicle is going to be designed and produced. We are trying to showcase the sources of stuff which is done in Canada as much as we can. There is no vehicles in the world that source completely from within one country. Every vehicle in North America sources things from United States, Mexico, and Canada, no matter where the assembly is. Just like in Europe, there is no one country that can produce cars that only source within its borders. Even in Asia, you are sourcing parts from all over the world. It is not only an electrical vehicle platform, but also a technology platform. So technology supplier across Canada don't need to be located next to the final assembly facility to be able to supply it. This is a unique opportunity for the complete automotive and auto-tech system to come together and teaming with our EV team in Canada.Q: What about phase three and four? Will it be available for mass production next year? What role can Taiwan play in the collaboration with Canadian industries?A: Phase three and four kind of happen concurrently. Phase three is designing the digital twin, and phase four is production. So we are designing the full functioning of the digital version of the vehicle itself. And then the production of the concept car as well.Q: What is the function of the digital twin? What are the use case or effect you want it to perform?A: This is one of the rare opportunities we want to showcase how a vehicle could be made and will be made in the future. In the past, whenever you want to participate in the manufacturing of a vehicle, you have to build and make physical components and do various iterations. From the digital twin side, you can not only create digital versions of the files, but also test it dynamically and digitally in many types of environments. We are partnering with several institutions in Canada on the virtual showcase. We are working at the ecosystem out of the Windsor area, which involves Windsor Economic Development Corporation, as well as University of Winsor, etc. We are also working with Ontario Tech University, and they have a wind tunnel to do all-weather testing in physical ways but also digitally with all the data accumulated.So the digital twin will allow us not only to do a lot more dynamic testing in showcasing, but also enable a lot more participants to join in. You can only have so many suppliers in a produced vehicle, but in a digital environment, you can mix up, plug and play, for the optimal results without having to worry about the tooling cost and everything else you need to spend on producing all the elements. And you can combine other technologies within it, in more dynamic and quicker ways. What is great about the digital twin is that it can travel with you in your pocket. It is easier to bring around and interact around the world in real time whether we are home or abroad and give people the platform to engage with the vehicle to see how different things are working in concert with one another, and how they operate independent systems in different environments.Q: It certainly is a very interesting new way to build cars in the future. Foxconn recently announced their MIH framework and a joint venture with Geely to build future electric cars. Do you see any possibility for their model to work for Project Arrow? Or is it more of a competitive kind of things?A: I am somewhat familiar with what they are trying to do. A lot of companies now are looking at this opportunity to revolutionize the way vehicles are made. Using a more technological foundation, being more flexible and dynamic, incorporating new ideas into the systems that are going to be built, is allowing new players to enter this space.One thing is for certain. There will be competitions, but there will also be cooperation across the market. Because with all of the investment and work being done, EV still makes up a small percentage in actual vehicles on the road. It's going to increase over time. But it is going to need the cooperation with OEMs, to work with the market to cause consumer shifts that changes mindsets, use cases, buying preferences, etc. As much as you want to compete with one another, there is going to have some cooperation. It is one of those areas where there may be partnerships that we have never seen before. For example, Honda with GM, working together on Cruise, here in North America; or BMW and Mercedes in Europe; and battery initiatives between France and Germany.There is going to be work between countries and between companies. So there is a lot of areas we can participate. One thing is for sure: electronics and the hardware within the vehicle have been and will be playing an ever-increasingly important role in the value of EVs going forward. We know Taiwan has a lot of advanced works in those fields that they have been doing for a long time. The people and experts in Taiwan will have a lot to give. The market in Taiwan is big, but not massive, while the Canadian market is huge in geography with tiny population based in some urban centers and rural areas.There will always be room for cooperation to look for new markets and new opportunities. Sometimes a couple of different applications working in concert will provide new ideas and new opportunities to work with different consumers and different customers, and even new investors.Q: Which sectors of Taiwanese manufacturers are having the most opportunity of cooperation with Project Arrow, in your opinion?A: One of the companies we are looking forward to working with is a company called E-One Moli out of Vancouver. They have been around for a very long time. Tesla's battery has its roots out of E-One Moli. And E-One Moli actually produces battery cells out of Taiwan. So there is cross linkages of some of the companies leading the future of EV space, such as Tesla, it is investing in talent that came out of that facility, which is now manufacturing out of Taiwan. There are connective tissues of cooperation that we can definitely build upon. And you have expertise in electronics. And we can also cooperate in R&D to improve batteries in terms of weights, volumes, and range. The batteries are great, but people in Canada will always be worried about warmth and cold. The batteries power everything in the vehicles now. So everything has a pull on the electronics, which includes software and everything else. It is going to affect the range and the performance. So there is all kinds of stuff in the software and battery management system that the Taiwanese ecosystem has been working on for a while now. There is definitely an opportunity to learn. But there will also be competition. No doubt about that. You have companies hiring away talent from other firms and bringing them on board. But while volumes of EV are still small, healthy cooperation in line of competition is going to be necessary to get to the point where the inflection of EVs becomes predominant across the world.CES 2020 gave us a new way to see mobility in the future. You walk into the booth of Hyundai expecting to see a car, but actually they're showcasing a vehicle without wheels. The automotive world is moving towards technological space, and it is more about future mobility and the connection with a customer journey and how they want to move from one place to another. We are seeing more investments in flying taxis/cars as well as micro mobility vehicles such as electrical scooters, e-bikes or autonomous shuttles, different types of urban transit vehicles.GM has announced at CES about building flying Cadillac, and Fiat-Chrysler is teaming up with flying EV startup Archer. The investments are more than just the itinerary of internal combustion vehicles themselves, but also in hydrogen cars, solid state batteries, etc. All of those things are not only converging but they are accelerating their developments as well.We welcome interactions from Taiwanese companies on our platforms, and will be hosting a multitude of new events. I would encourage you to engage with our trade offices, which are excellent conduits, to look for opportunities of cooperation. Our platform is open; there is no harm in reaching out to us asking what can we do together. The new NAFTA agreement would go into effect on July 1st. It has opened up at minimum 6-8 billion dollars' worth of new automotive business opportunities here in Canada. So there is room for growth. I would be very happy to help look for opportunities for R&D and business development.Warren Ali, SVP of innovation at APMAPhoto: APMA

As electrification becomes a clear trend for future cars, solutions for infrastructure, power supply and batteries are very much in need to develop a sound and sustainable ecosystem in line with such a trend. Propulsion Quebec is an NPO created to support the ecological transition of transportation by enhancing the collaborative efforts of the industry.Digitimes recently talked to Propulsion Quebec CEO Sarah Houde to better understand how the Canadian province of Quebec is developing its EV ecosystem through her organization.Q: Please give a brief introduction to your organization and your mission.A: We are a non-profit organization that was created with the initiative of the government of Quebec to accelerate the development of our high potential industries. It was created in 2017. At the moment it is still an emerging industry, but is very fast growing and with high potential for many different reasons. Our key performance index would focus on the number of jobs, the contribution to Quebec economy, and the number of companies and their size, as well as exports. We have 210 members right now, most of them are manufacturing and services in five different sectors, such as electric vehicles (EV), smart vehicles, smart infrastructure, mobility services, and charging infrastructure.In the electrical vehicle sector, they range from mining companies that provide strategic and critical elements for the batteries, to the vehicles at the OEMs. We don't manufacture that many cars, but we do everything else. Our spectrum spans from electrical scooters, and electrical trains, and everything in between, such as electric buses, trucks, snowmobile, garbage trucks, bikes, etc.In the charging industry, we have members manufacturing charging stations, components, hardware and software for smart vehicles and infrastructure.Our 5th sector is the innovative business model of smart mobility, such as bike-sharing, car-pooling, mass mobility as a service, apps, etc.We are a team of 20 people, based in Montreal, but we are covering all Quebec. We have members all across the territory.By identifying obstacles for our industry, we are concentrating all our efforts towards, basically, regulation and public policies, to help transition from internal combustion engine vehicles to more sustainable mobility. We also work on R&D, experimentation, demonstration and commercialization, which covers the cycle of developing a product. We also work on workforce issue, to make sure conditions such as we are growing the industry but we don't have candidates to fill the positions won't happen. That's not worth it, so we work with post-secondary institutions so that they offer the right training. And we help our companies to attract the right credential candidates. Finally, we work with private funding, private equity funds, banks, just to make sure our industry gets the right portion of private investments to meet their needs to growth.Q: Since your establishment, there have been exponential growth in your membership. Can you also share with us the trends of significant growth in the industry?A: Sure. Across the world, there has been exponential growth for electrical vehicles of all sorts. We see that in Quebec because we have manufacturers that were there at very early stages and have been growing. We had zero members when we were established in 2017, and now we have 210 (all Quebec companies). All of our KPIs, including the number of the companies, their sizes, exports, sales, and contributions to Quebec GDPs, we calculated them in 2018. At the time KPMG did the calculation, and there were 147 companies, and now we have 210. Lion Electric company (a Canadian company that manufactures electrical vehicles) now has six models, compared to only one model just three years ago. It is mind blowing.Q: What is Canada's vision for future transportation behind this project? What goals and purposes were set for this endeavor?A: I do not speak for the government of Canada. But I think we share this vision of using ecological transition as a development tool. We are tapping on our assets, such as hydraulic electricity in Quebec, which contributes a great deal of power we use at very low tariffs. That makes a business case for electrification. We also have the critical minerals I mentioned for the batteries. We have the natural resources, and pool of expertise from the National Research Center on electricity. We also have a pool of experts from artificial intelligence (AI), which is super useful for optimization of transportation flow, logistics, etc. There are very innovative elements plus the natural resources, and when put together, you can hope to create an economic development movement that is supporting the transition into a more sustainable growth. Here in Canada, or Quebec, transportation is responsible for 43% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission, so when we transition on transportation, we really have a significant impact on the environment. So it is in Canada's vision to invest in that sector to achieve economic development goals as well as GHG emission reduction.Q: How can Taiwan be a partner to support Canada's transition in smart transportation industry? Any specific companies that you have in mind to become partners as such?A: Yes, we think we should be attractive to many Taiwanese companies. Besides all those assets as I mentioned, the cost of living here in Quebec and especially Montreal is also low. We also have government incentives for R&D, so we do have attractive elements for Taiwanese tech companies related to smart transportation and electrical vehicle sectors. This is where we would both benefit from a closer relationship.Q: The Taiwanese companies play a very dominant role in the global supply chain, serving lots of North American companies in the electricity, EV industry. Now Taiwan also has a big EV ecosystem proposed by Foxconn, which is called MIH. What kind of opportunities are open to Taiwanese tech companies? Would you consider MIH a potential member for your alliance?A: Yes of course. It would be a win-win cooperation. Maybe there are also opportunities for the Taiwanese companies in working with us in R&D, prototypes, advanced manufacturing, finding solutions for complex problems, etc. We are working on a EV with a battery that can get you further, carry heavier loads, with faster charging - everybody all around the world are trying to invent those things. If we can work with Taiwanese companies, especially your readers, I think it would be on R&D projects. We are developing an innovation hub, called "sustainable mobility city," for companies that are big, small, local, and international to work together on collaborative research projects with researchers from Quebec to find solutions on those complex problems. They work together in a neutralized space, use neutralized equipment and shared IP. The idea is to accelerate the R&D process in the sustainable mobility sector. This is a highly competitive sector at the international level. This is where we should be working together.Q: As you mentioned EV and batteries are important industries in Quebec. Are there rare earth deposits and mining in Quebec as well?A: Yes. We have lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite. These are the most present minerals we have. There are also other kinds of rare earth in Canada, but these four are the most present.Q: Canada is very advanced on the AI field, while Taiwanese companies are very strong on the hardware side. They are very complementary.A: Quebec seems to be a perfect place to develop batteries, because we have the natural resources, stable and predictable political environment. We also have the cleanest energy mix in America, ideal for batteries supply chain. Manufacturing 4.0 is such a big program here, to ensure we use as much automation as possible to enhance productivity across the country, definitely a priority. For complex vehicles that we manufacture in Canada, we also need automation to build, sustain, and maintain them.Q: Propulsion Quebec has already led 16 trade missions to different markets around the world. What are the markets that you have visited, and do you have plans to visit Asia?A: Most of our trade missions are in the US, because they are our main export market. We have had 16 trade mission in three years. We had one in Europe, and have been to Asia twice. In 2019 we went to Singapore, and the year before that we went to China and Japan. Our next stops in Asia would probably be South Korea and Taiwan when Covid is behind us.Propulsion Quebec CEO Sarah HoudePhoto: Propulsion Quebec

The Canadian Trade Office in Taipei is endeavoring to accelerate collaboration between Canadian startups and Taiwanese companies. Canada's AI strength and car-manufacturing prowess and Taiwan's competitiveness in ICT hardware manufacturing are complementary and have great potential to create synergies.Jordan Reeves, executive director of the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei, explained in a recent interview by Digitimes how his office is forging ties to benefit both Canda and Taiwan.Q: We learned that the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei has a new project to introduce Canada's startups to Taiwanese companies. Could you share the purpose of the project and explain why Taiwan has suddenly become important for Canadian companies?A: We launched a Canadian Technology Accelerator in Taiwan at the end of 2018. This is the largest single commercial project that my ministry - Global Affairs Canada - has ever funded in Taiwan. We have accelerator programs in Silicon Valley and Boston and have had lots of success there for many years. We wanted to bring this success to Asia. We were considering four locations (of which Taiwan was one) for this accelerator program. It was part of our economic diversification strategy. We wanted to see increased trade and investment with Asia.In recognition of Taiwan's important place in ICT value chains, and to build on a very successful foundation of science and technology collaboration between Canada's National Research Council and Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology over the past 24 years, we made the decision to launch an accelerator here in Taiwan.Our focus is on several areas, such as artificial intelligence (AI) applications, Internet of Things (IoT), or AIoT. We have also looked at several sectors which have potential for new business. ICT is one, health-tech is another. Many Canadian startups went to Silicon Valley, looking for financing. Taiwan was a little bit different. Their purpose here in Taiwan is to develop prototypes, commercialize prototypes, or for some, to find partners to scale up production. Others are looking for ways to reduce their research and development costs. We have a network in Taiwan now of 200 mentors, partners, and industry contacts. We have space at Taipei Tech Arena and have a partnership with Epoch Foundation and Garage+. I can tell you that, so far in 2021, a total of 150 Canadian startups have applied to come to Taiwan through our program.In addition, this is the year of Canadian-Taiwanese Innovators. We officially launched it in Tainan back in September 2020. It was a joint decision with Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua. The idea was to combine Canadian software capabilities and Taiwan's hardware engineering prowess, and to forge new innovation partnerships.Q: How many startups are included in this project? Are all the 150 companies that have expressed interest or approached you able to attend?A: No, we have a rigorous selection process as we work with our mentors and the CTOs of many companies in Taiwan. At the end of the day, we want to maximize the chances of success for these startup firms. This way, we know right off the bat that there are going to be deep business discussions when they come to Taiwan.Q: What are the benefits and opportunities that a collaboration between Canada and Taiwan firms can bring to both sides? Can you share some examples of companies interested in collaborating with Taiwanese companies? What results would they want to achieve?For our broader vision, there are some really exciting opportunities right now. There will be interesting innovations in areas such as electrical vehicles (EV). Many expect value of electronics and chips in EVs will be double what it is now in traditional cars. So it's very important for Taiwanese electronics companies to establish partnerships within this emerging sector with companies from other countries. Canada is the fourth-largest automobile exporting country in the world. Ford, GM and Fiat Chrysler have recently made large investments in EVs in Canada. So, we feel that, in this particular area, there are many opportunities. We need to work more closely with Taiwanese electronics and ICT firms.Q: In which areas or verticals can Taiwan and Canada complement each other? What can be done to foster a deeper connection between both sides?A: We have quite a number of leading-edge tech firms in the automotive supply chain, producing all kinds of things, including sensors and imaging technology for autonomous vehicles. Immervision from Montreal, for example, with their 360 degree image-processing algorithm, can be applied to any type of camera. In seeing what we can do to bring tech firms like that to the EV and AV value chain and introduce them to Taiwanese initiatives such as Foxconn's MIH platform, for example.I would say digital health is another very important area. Many of the current IoT-enabled health solutions definitely rely on hardware for industrial computing and so on. That's another possible area for a lot of complementary businesses. And then there are areas such as smart manufacturing. Taiwan has a long history of manufacturing, whether it's bicycles, machinery and so on, and many of those companies are looking to apply AI solutions. Canada has real strength in AI. The Toronto area, for example, has the highest concentration of AI firms in the world by some estimates, with nearly 600 AI-focused companies.Let's take two examples to answer your questions. One is the Spartan Cube, a DNA analyzer, the size of a coffee cup. Samples are collected with a non-invasive swap, inserted in a single-use DNA cartridge. It is basically a PCR test. It was just approved by Health Canada on January 23. It is a portable testing kit, making it very easy to use. And within minutes it can produce very accurate test results for COVID-19.It is, in fact, a collaboration between Wistron, which manufactures its shell, and Spartan Bioscience in Canada. This is a perfect example of the sort of potential we see for collaborations between Taiwanese and Canadian companies. Software or intellectual property (IP) developed in Canada coming together with the right engineering partner in Taiwan.Wistron is also working with Canadian company B-Temia. That product has received Taiwan FDA and US FDA approval. Their product, Keeogo Exoskeleton, is a walking assistance device which is used to help people regain mobility after serious injury. It is selling quite well in Taiwan.Taiwan has been such a great partner for Canada. We are very excited about the possibilities going forward.Q: The trade wars and the pandemic have changed the world in a significant way. What trend have you spotted in the supply chain of Canadian companies worldwide?A: We all know that rising labor costs in China, US-China trade frictions, the development of new technologies, such as AI, EV, autonomous vehicles, the impact of the pandemic recently, and the concern of some governments to maintain domestic production of critical goods - all of these factors are contributing to changes in global supply chains.We see a real urgency and an opportunity for Canadian and Taiwanese firms to work together. Taiwanese companies are moving some of their current production and future production from mainland China back to Taiwan or to other markets. At the same time, the Canadian government has been encouraging Canadian companies to diversify their trade and investment toward and across the Asian region.We have real opportunities right now we did not have before. From a policy perspective, I should say that, in Canada, our policy approach continues to promote free trade, keeping borders open for trade and investment. Canada currently has trade agreements covering two-thirds of the world's GDP. In relative terms, Canada continues to be very open towards people through our immigration policy. For example, Canada is taking between 300,000-400,000 of immigrants every year. We haven't stopped, despite the rise of protectionism in other countries in the last few years. At the same time, Canada attracts tens of thousands of foreign students. We see it as a great benefit for the country.On the business side, we've made it simpler for Canadian companies and foreign companies to apply to bring in the engineers they need. Under the Global Skills Strategy program, the government of Canada responds in two weeks or less to applications to bring in highly skilled or specialized workers. Close to 90% of applications are approved. Canada remains an open place when it comes to investment, trade, and talent. This is an advantage for Taiwanese companies that make Canada a partner.Jordan Reeves, executive director of Canadian Trade Office in TaipeiPhoto: Michael Lee, Digitimes, March 2021

Window of opportunity has opened up for Polish startup IS-Wireless, which was nominated for DigitalEurope's Future Unicorn Award 2021, having won several other awards in Europe with its innovative 5G mobile communications technologies. They have joined the Garage+ accelerator of the Epoch Foundation in Taiwan, hoping to find hardware partners from Taiwan to deliver their new model of 5G communications at lower cost and better performance.IS-Wireless CEO Slawomir Pietrzyk recently talked to Digitimes about his visions.Q: Could you give a brief introduction to your core team and the company's value proposition?A: I received my PhD in wireless communications at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and two of our colleagues did their PhD studies at National Chiao Tung University in Hsiunchu. The team consists of 50 highly skilled telecom professionals who have experience in building telecommunication networks, starting from 2G and 3G trough 4G and now 5G. We have also a research part of the company which is already focused on 6G. We are a company providing mobile networks of the future. We try to challenge the status quo, which is dominated by the big providers, such as Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, etc. We are building the gears, including hardware and software for rollouts of the networks. This technology domain is getting to a point of saturation, as the big players each are trying to cover the whole value chain. This situation is called "vendor lock-in," very similar to the computer industry 30 years ago, where single vendors sold software and peripherals products incompatible with other companies. The same thing is happening in the mobile industry and reaching the point of saturation would mean the end of possibilities in this industry.In order to release creativity and move forward, and help lower the prices at the same time, we need to do the same thing which happened 30 years ago in the computer industry, which also involved Taiwanese companies, which is modulization of PCs. Instead of using those incompatible computers, people standardized computer hardware 30 years ago, which allowed consumers to insert cards in computers made by many different suppliers, provided they complied with those standards. The software was totally different. You could install whatever operating system, and on top of that you can build different applications. Each of those elements came from independent suppliers, because the value chain was open. This is happening in the mobile industry. We are one of the few players in the world that is following this trend.We focus on the radio access part, which is the most technologically demanding. Our value is in functionality definition and in implementation of software responsible for those functionality. Taiwanese firms are great in developing hardware, so we look forward to establishing relations with companies which develop computing hardware, such as servers, and the remote radio heads.Q: In the Garage+ brochure, you pointed out that IS-Wireless is participating in the Open-RAN revolution and expects significant changes in how networks are built and deployed in the future. Can you elaborate that vision?A: The things that I have been describing so far was more on the side of the providers, the functionalities and the network gears. They are installed in the mobile networks of telecom service operators, such as Orange, Verizon, etc. Traditionally, mobile service operators tend, so far, to cover all the value chain. From building the networks, running the networks, offering services, etc. But it is a very silo-based thinking, which definitely will have to change.Let me give you an example. Building and running the sites is the least welcoming business of the network operators. Site acquisition, network maintenance, are all costly. Right now companies tend to sell those part of business to external partners. What I believe is that in the near future, especially the locations where the network gear, the base stations, and especially the radio units will have to be co-located with other type of infrastructure. Lamp posts is one example, but there are much more. We will face a massive distribution of those radio units, tiny base stations, in order to cover small area to densify the network. You need small and low-power units, like WiFi kind of access points. They can even be installed before being used by the same token as the Ethernet cables in the offices. This is the only way to provide significant capacity improvement.The change of gravity is huge. It normally takes 15 months for European telecom operators to build huge sites, which includes acquiring site, and actual build-up of the base station. That is like the stone age for providing the services. Now with our solution, if the operator has already acquired the tiny radio gears, and the owner of kiosks or the city municipality permits the use of lamp posts and bus stops, then those non-telecom infrastructures will serve as access points of the radio gears. The time required for installation can be significantly shorten with this new business model.The single unit of the radio gears is cheap, but you need to produce a huge number of them, in order to get the optimal network performance.Q: It is a brilliant idea for smart city models. Are you already in talks with cities or governments in Europe for this deployment?A: We are at the stage of getting it out of the labs. We have demonstrated the operability of our solution in the labs, and right now we are conducting proof-of-concept trials, including small-site rollouts. This is the step before commercial roll-outs in the cities. Smart city application is only one of the applications. We are also targeting industrial applications and we plan to have rollouts to address the needs for operators providing private networks, which are favored by many companies. This is especially visible in Germany, which auctioned 5G bandwidth for private operators. In addition to auctioning large chunks of bandwidth for the whole country, they allowed localizing licensing of bandwidth per square kilometer, at the price of about single thousand euros, not millions of euros as country-wide auction options. You can imagine how many more business cases can carry such affordable costs. It is seeing explosive demand in Germany and we hope to see similar situation in Poland, which is scheduled to auction frequencies for 5G in 2021. Taiwan also had a private 5G bandwidth auction, a trend we have been very much interested in.Q: Security is a key issue for 5G, not only the geopolitical issues raised by the US in the case of Huawei. In the age of Internet of Things (IoT), networks are vulnerable to hacking. Do you have any solution for protecting security?A: Certainly. Security is at the heart of our solution; we put great emphasis to this. At the geopolitical level, we are building our infrastructure locally. For this part of the world which is in collaboration with NATO and the US, we can be the supplier that is accountable not just for our homeland deployment, but also for the whole European Union, and/or allies of NATO and the US.At the system level, our system is developed with the open model, all the interfaces can be checked by the community. You have much more people to challenge this, compared to the single, silo-based block model of the traditional vendors. Everything is hidden in the traditional model, and the customers over-pay for security which they have no idea what kind of protection they are getting.Our system also has superiority in flexibility. For that open system, which also is equipped up-to-date security counter-measures for threats, you can use the open-system counter-measures tailored for the risks you are facing, because you can take it as a module from an independent security provider. This is very important, you can have the functionality of one vendor, while the security of that vendor can be locally verified in any country.And we also put a lot of emphasis on certification of security. We have just initiated a project with the Polish National Telecommunications Institute, on safeguarding security between the network security functions and aligned computing resources. This is because we allow our software to run on dedicated hardware, such as servers, and shared resources, such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft Azure. That poses different kind of challenges, but we are addressing them as well.Q: Are you seeing competitors which are also startups that are offering similar solutions?A: There are three or four such companies globally. They are already engaged and working for rollouts. They are also providing solutions with the open radio-networking philosophy. They are on wave one, but we are considered as wave two. We believe we have better technology. In most of their cases, the software they offer is decoupled from hardware. Our software is not only decoupled but partitionable from the very beginning. Another difference is they typically start from the upgrade of 4G implementation, while we started from 5G at the very beginning. We are confident to say, after the rollout, we will deliver deployments at a much better level of quality and flexibility.Besides, the competitors are pushing for large-sites with customers who focus on their current needs. I would say that is a technological trap, because the large-site rollout that they focus on will soon get saturated.Q: What is your business model? Do you license IP? How do you generate revenues?A: Very good questions. We want to address two types of customers. One is technologically savvy operators, which understand the technology and can control the whole value chain themselves. Rakuten Mobile of Japan is a good example of such kind of customer. For this kind of customer, we are willing to simply license our software and make sure it matches the hardware it controls. The second group of customers are more likely to get the low-hanging fruits faster. They are not that technologically savvy because they are from different industries. Let's imagine we are working with a railway company or with an airport. They are not telecom companies, but they have the potential of either running their private networks or deploy networks that they would rent or license to someone else. With that, we will provide total solution, including both software and hardware. We will not be producing hardware but would like to work as a partner with hardware manufacturers to offer total solution. We also provide installation and integration service to whatever is needed.Very often we can think of running system integration with non-telecom companies such as Amazon who have access to customers. We can also work as a supplier of the network gears to provide network functionality and able to install the elements needed for localization.Q: IS-Wireless is also preparing for the emergence of 6G technology? Will your 5G technology be obsolete when 6G takes over?A: No, it won't happen that way. I am old enough to observe 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G, with 3G and 4G the center of my professional career. We expect that 6G will be a continuation of 5G concepts. The 5G services currently provided by large operators is not too different from 4G, regarding the technical concept. The novelty of 5G is the possibility of opening up the value chains. You can have the elements of the wireless gears, decoupled from the software. In the past, they are inseparable. 5G brings slicing of services. What will 6G be? It will be an evolution. The leapfrogging technology we are working on right now is exactly a 6G strategy. We are very confident that the future lies with the trend of software decoupling from hardware, and a bottom-up approach of building massive numbers of low-power sites versus the top-down approach of traditional 3G/4G rollouts. That is because you would not have the luxury of building a totally new network, and the limit of the wave length requires density of the network. In the future, 6G gears will have to be co-located with other infrastructures, and you need to share those bandwidths with multiple users.Q: Is the purpose of IS-Wireless to join the community of Garage+ accelerator to get access to potential manufacturing partners in Taiwan?A: That is one of the reasons, but there are more. The first thing is to find partners with hardware manufacturing capabilities. We already have some relationships that we would like to deepen, in the direction of computing and radio units. During my visit in 2019, I learned that there are interests from Taiwanese companies to invest in technological startups. If we can establish a collaboration with Taiwanese companies which are strong in hardware manufacturing, it would be complementary and would benefit both sides, because our strength is in software. And Taiwan is also the perfect place to propagate to the entire region of Asia. We also share similar values. Poles and Taiwanese are both good at abstract thinking and creative way of solving problems. I believe we are better than our western European colleagues as a partner for Taiwanese companies.Q: Do you have any expansion plan or fund-raising plan this year or next?A: We are now a company of around 50 people, which is like a teenager in the life of a human being. We are growing rapidly and learning rapidly. To build a team to support the early rollouts and trials that I mentioned earlier, maintaining customer relationships, and finishing technical work for optimizing, adding or improving our product, we are looking for investments of around US$10 million this year as a bridge-financing to get us to the point of implementing larger rollouts.Right now we are looking for early adopters who are customers that are willing to work with us, a very agile and fast-responding company. In their domain, we can be a very strong differentiator.IS-Wireless CEO Slawomir PietrzykPhoto: Company

RISC-V has grabbed headlines recently as the open-source technology is now viewed as a hotbed for innovation. It is also a source of intellectual properties (IP) freely open to the market and free from political wrestling between the two largest economies in the world.Digitimes recently had a virtual meeting with James Prior, head of global communications of SiFive, a pioneer in RISC-V. He talked about the RISC-V ecosystem and the opportunities up for global partnerships and innovation.Q: We are curious about SiFive's CPU IP roadmap. Is it your strategy to aim for MCU market and high-end, high-performance IP market? What do you think about the outlook of open-source instruction set architecture (not only SiFive, but also other). What's your opinion about the tech and the difference between MIPS and RISC-V?A: SiFive IP has been very successful in micro-controllers for embedded. So we have a lot of wins there across the globe because that technology is very accessible, and doesn't need any trade restriction requirement. Companies like Synaptics or brand-new startups, they mix RISC-V IPs into existing designs. Most opportunities now is not having a 100% RISC-V chip, but a mix of ASICs or Arm or other cores with RISC-V to offer the best performance for watts and offer a consolidation and simplification for all those controllers cores.The SiFive RISC-V roadmap, such as U8 and VI7, adding vector capability to our products, that is going to allow them to be used in AI, inference, and deep-learning applications, also a DSP or fixed-function processing where traditionally you see a proprietary core or an IP block. That is very flexible. We can replace that with a more flexible, single ISA and converge the processing, so you don't have to have CPU on one side, and other IP at another side, connected by a bus. Now as a single, programmable, cohesive unit--that is very attractive to programmers, because that is a lot more flexible. And it allows the code and the designs to scale across a product roadmap. So if you are an IC company trying to build chips, then you own the scalability, say you put a small chip here, and another there, or on the same chip that you just turn on and off the features. That scalability of the core allows you to do that very easily for building a portfolio.Now with our high-performance core processors, we are hoping to have the highest performing RISC-V core available in the market in 2021. The key to the SiFive Roadmap is more than just standard, single cores. As we approach the application markets and new designs, we are not simply trying to replace the Arm core. In an established market, it is challenging to displace mature processor solutions because of the inertia of intricate legacy software stack. Opportunities is everywhere else – accelerators, fabrics, network, all those connectivity options, the top-of-rack devices, the edge-computing, wherever decisions are moving to anything that need to be low-power and efficient, up-gradable, and scalable. Those are the opportunities for RISC-V and SiFive.And now where's the excitement in the semiconductor market? It's in AI, it's in automotive, 5G and 6G. It's in the brand-new frontier of technology where they need all these features and capabilities outside the datacenter. So that's a very strong interest for us and that's where our roadmap is going to take us. That's where we see the big growth opportunities. Because those are the 20%/30%/40% CAGR markets. Since there are so much opportunity, it is not a zero-sum competition. Everybody can build and sell more. There are tons of opportunities and availability for wins and accelerating designs. What that translates to, is we have a world-wide opportunity in every geography for our technology. We do have some partner companies. We have an affiliate company in China, StarFive Technology. They work to sell inside the Greater China region, very directly, great relationships, very closely working together there to help support the China economy and China local customer needs. And we are happy to work with them, abiding by the trade regulations to let them be the people in the region doing the work to enable China. SiFive has offices in Taiwan, South Korea, India, Europe, in France, as well as in the US. We have global opportunities, and we work with everyone through that network.Q: You mentioned about the opportunity in the China market. I am curious about the relationship between StarFive and SiFive. Is StarFive an independent company? They use a lot of SiFive IP and software tools and cloud platform.A: StarFive is a separate company, fully independent. They have their own CEO, investors, sales, marketing, and engineering teams. We have licensing agreements between the two companies. They license IP to Chinese companies to abide by the trade regulations. And, they can develop their own IP. StarFive has their own engineers, they own roadmaps. They can sell directly to other companies. There is no control from SiFive. They are autonomous and can do whatever they need to succeed in that market. It's a very flexible model. They let RISC-V spread around, and let us learn what they are doing, while they learn from what we are doing. And they increase the portfolio of product offering as we try to grab as much market share as we can.Q: Is StarFive 100% funded by China? Or SiFive has a stock holding in it?A: I believe SiFive has a small holding, a minority stake. But we try to work towards a structure where StarFive can be more independent and stand on their own to service the Greater China market. That's the plan in 2021. But we don't typically disclose the ownership stratucture of a partner company, and we leave it for StarFive to decide on how they want to handle it.Q: You mentioned that there are lots of opportunities in accelerators, AI, etc., I found that SiFive also has an interface IP, which is HBM2 and HBM2E. Those kind of IP is only used in high-end datacenter servers, such as Nvidia A-100 or Intel's high-tend VPGA. Why SiFive develops this product line? Right now it is still a very small market, because interposer is very expensive. It's not the same market that we talked about, such as MCU, or AGAI.A: Yes, that's a very good observation. We do have a broad portfolio of non- RISC-V core IPs through our business unit, OpenFive. OpenFive is based on the Open-Silicon acquisition now developed into a full design house. They can build a chip for any customer, from specification written on a napkin and turn it into a design. They are ISA agnostic, so they can work with any ISA. To do that we need to have capabilities for multi-die and chiplet aggregate-disaggregation products, die-to-die as well as chiplet interface IP and memory IP.We promote HBM2E, and we also have full memory IP such SRAM, and many other memory technologies, but we choose to promote HBM2E. We have seen some movements of HBM2E out of datacenter, into edge datacenters, and into some edge-related products. It is quite unusual. I have seen edge products that are not just 5, 10, 15, 25 watts of power, but also near 100 or 200 watts. That's because they need much more decision-making capability. Edge doesn't imply it's battery-operated or it's tiny. It can be quite large and robust inside a factory or an office building, or city infrastructure. This requires a lot of computing because decision-making capability is needed.That's where we are seeing a ton of opportunities as people try to solve problems such as "how do I make sure facial recognition private and secure, as well as fast and accurate?" And everything else goes along with that happening inside of a particular container versus putting more pressure on the mobile networks and the storage networks, etc.Yes, there is a small market for HBM2E now, and it is growing. And you are going to see die-to-die, chip-to-chip is going to be useful. These are all emerging opportunities for RISC-V. We know where the different options are coming from, it is all multi-layer strategy. In a perfect world, you would want to replace all those cores and buses with something, and they come from SiFive. But the real world is, people want to move in phases. So they start with a micro-controller core, bus interface, or interconnect. Once they gain confidence and trust, they move to the next level. We saw lots of repeat businesses in 2020. It was a strong year that we saw first-generation customers coming back for second-generation designs.Q: Could you share with us the status of the RISC-V ecosystem? What part of RISC-V that SiFive would like to focus on?A: RISC-V alliance ecosystem is growing very fast. Now there is more than 1,000 members in this organization, including 500 companies and many individual contributors.The way SiFive contributes back to the organization is that the inventors of RISC-V work at SiFive, and they leave the technical groups at the RISC-V organization. For example, the RISC-V vector-extension working group is led by the chief architect at SiFive, who is also one of the inventors, Dr Krste Asanovic. We are very involved with RISC-V daily, not only in what the extension is going to be, but working with everybody else in the industry, pulling together the feedbacks and making it work and developing it for useful extensions and products.The ecosystem is looking good, lots of progress in creating software. Recently at a RISC-V summit, SiFive CEO Patrick Little talked about what it means for RISC-V being good to great. That's going to happen as the software projects accelerate. Now there is a lot of open-source projects going on, some for Android, some for RISC-V, for Java and many for Linux distributions. SiFive is helping to accelerate that with our HiFive Unmatched, a development board which fits a standard PC form factor, and will be available towards the end of Q1, that includes the expansion capabilities of SSDs and graphics cards. More and more companies are getting interested in moving their open-source applications into RISC-V. Open-source and commercial companies alike, they want to make sure their products are available in RISC-V use cases. The demand is getting stronger, because the customers want their SOC products to be RISC-V based solutions. That pull is coming from the automotive market, the AI market, and the datacenter market, as they require better software ecosystems and more developers working on these projects.SiFive has 200 wins with 80 companies, with six currently publicly announced: Synaptics, Fadu, Samsung, Qualcomm, Microchip, Huami, Coherent Logix, and Innovium. We've got RISC-V core in the Snapdragon 865 from Qualcomm, Samsung used our RISC-V core for their 5G and autonomous driving chips. Synaptics uses our microcontrollers core for their USB type C display for laptop, notebooks and docking stations. Coherent Logix is using our 5-series cores for their programmable networking chips that they use for communications. FADU uses our core for their SSD controller. We have a wide portfolio, they range from consumer, commercial, and everything else.Q: Would the Export Administration Regulation (EAR) of the United States impact the SiFive strategies or plan to sell to China?A: I don't think that will affect our strategy. SiFive as a US company strictly complies with US regulations including the EAR, and all the IP and other products we license or transfer to StarFive to be sold in the Greater China region had been carefully assessed against the EAR and additional US export regulations. Whenever applicable, SiFive had requested US Bureau of Industry and Security (USBIS) to review and approve our Export Control Classification Number (ECCN) to ensure compliance.The existence of StarFive sets up RISC-V for success in China, because StarFive is able to develop its own IPs and use open-source projects and software to support as well as develop their own. Wherever SiFive is not able to work with the customers, StarFive as a separate and independent entity, can do it. SiFive and StarFive work jointly to expand RISC-V worldwide, by mobilizing designers, developers and partners in all important economies. The only thing you can be sure is that political things will change. It is going to be different in another 10 years.Within the restriction by the US government, SiFive is able to work with and sell to customers in China. But normally we would talk to StarFive first and figure out whether it's a StarFive-only project or a joint project, based on the regulation and requirements.Q: In the global ecosystem, what role do Taiwanese IP companies play?A: They are probably the most important part of the semiconductor industry right now, especially TSMC, the immense elite. With that technology, everybody is going to be willing to be part of that story. There are also a number of IP companies inside Taiwan that provide many other solutions. They have very valuable IPs, so working with those guys is key. That's SiFive's story in the beginning. We try not to be the only place you get SiFive IPs, but be open to work with everybody else. So while SiFive offers PCIE, die-to-die Interconnect and USB memory controller IP, as well as RISC-V cores, we maintain close-knit relationship not only with the foundry but also the other IP founders in Taiwan. And that is incredibly important. SiFive also has set up an engineering office in Taiwan to leverage the strong semiconductor talent pool as well as better collaborate with those Taiwanese companies, manage sales, engineering and customer success, and strategic partnership for OpenFive busines. For RISC-V IP business, Taiwan falls under the Greater China geo and we work with customers there through StarFive.SiFive head of global communications James PriorPhoto: Company

For startups expanding overseas, the most challenging is often not about obtaining capital or orders, but rather cross-cultural operations and collaboration. Evy Chang, head of investor relations at Vietnam-based Wiziin, comes from a mixed cultural background - Taiwanese and Indonesian - knows much about such challenges. Before moving to Vietnam two years ago, Chang had worked as management consultant at the Business Development Institute (BDI) and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in Shanghai.During a recent interview by Digitimes, Chang talked about how Taiwanese companies and startups can overcome the challenges of cultural sensitivity when operating in Southeast Asia.Q: Vietnam has signed free trade agreements (FTAs) with many countries, attracting many manufacturing industries to invest and set up factories in the country. But how can investors overcome the disadvantage of unfamiliar environments when operating overseas?A: Taiwan is good at manufacturing, but frankly speaking, Vietnam is no longer a cheap place to run mannufacturing operations. So you must not still think about how to use the cheap labor in Vietnam; but rather how to transform along with Vietnam. Therefore, we should face the reality, understand the needs of local consumers and customers, and transform in line with the local conditions. I have been doing fieldwork in university and graduate school studying the cross-border expansion of Taiwanese businesses, and I deeply feel that it will be very difficult to work oveaseas markets if one refuses to get out of his or her own comfort zone.Even if you move Vietnam, you will still have to step out of the small circle you are familiar with, or you would find yourself mingling with foreign expatriates. In District 2 where many foreign expatriates gather in Vietnam, the atmosphere is very much like the West. If most of your colleagues are still foreigners, and you live in a place where most of the people are foreigners, you won't know Vietnam well.Q: What should I do then?You must be willing to put yourself in an uncomfortable situation all the time, because there is no faster learning opportunity than making yourself a minority. In my previous company, less than 10 of the 100 employees were foreigners, and I was highly immersed in the local culture as I spent time with them every day. Although there were many challenges, it was the quickest way to learn.It is necessary to learn the local language. If you speak English, you will be able to jump around in the urban areas of Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, but it will be hard to look at a menu without pictures. If you are the founder of a new business and do not speak the local language, it is important to find a partner who speaks it and who is familiar with the local system and culture to be the chief of operations and help you keep an eye on all the operations and execution.You set the general direction, but you need him to drive it and restate it in a way that the locals understand. This is especially important when pushing for change in your company's systems. Often, we all have good intentions, but when there is a language barrier and you are not sensitive enough to the language and culture, I'm afraid everyone will be upset when the order is given. The ideal person for such a partner is a local who speaks the local language and understands culture but who has lived overseas for a long time.There are many Vietnamese who speak Vietnamese, but have grown up in the West and have returned to Vietnam to start their own businesses in the past few years. Although teamwork is always a matter of integration, it saves a lot of effort to find a reliable person who understands the local area.Q: The manufacturing industry likes to talk about overseas expansion in terms of "replicating business models," but it's actually very difficult in the complex and diverse Southeast and South Asia, isn't it?A: This is probably because the manufacturing process is very clear: three raw materials are added together and the result is three. But in the service industry, one plus one plus one does not necessarily equal three. Take North, Central and South Vietnam for example. Many people see opportunities in Vietnam's manufacturing industry, which is concentrated in Binh Duong, west of Ho Chi Minh City, the home base of Taiwan's manufacturing industry.The bustling scene of traffic and horns that I experience every day when I commute to work is mainly in districts 1-4 of the more than a dozen districts of Ho Chi Minh City with nine million people. Da Nang in the central part of the country is known as the Hawaii of Vietnam and is a famous vacation spot, and there are many Internet technology companies there. But not far from there are rural areas where people still live in traditional houses.Indonesia is actually the same. You can't look at the Southeast Asian market as a collective one with 900 million people. You have to identify your target groups of customers. Is it the top 10% of the pyramid in Vietnam? Or the top 20% in Java? And then you move on from there.Vietnamese people are more hardworking, and their values are more similar to those of Taiwanese people, because Confucianism does have a deep influence on Vietnamese culture. In every culture, there is a big framework of "what I live for." It is worthwhile for entrepreneurs who want to expand their presence in Southeast Asia to understand the influence of these cultural backgrounds on the local people.Q: Taiwanese companies are learning to become multinational companies. What advice would you give them, given your cultural background and experience in working with multinational colleagues?A: One of the weaknesses of Taiwan is that we are very homogeneous and therefore take a lot of things for granted and lack sensitivity to other cultures. Cross-country operations may encounter people from multiple cultures working together, and the need to communicate and reach consensus is not something we are familiar with. We have also seen some large technology conglomerates go to overseas markets and still follow the corporate culture of the parent company, lacking a bridge and buffer for communication, thus causing many conflicts.We also need to find the right person who is familiar with the local culture and system, and to learn how to immerse ourselves in the local culture.It is very important to find such a person to take on this role, otherwise there is no way to deal with the problem of people in the organization. It is often the people who are the most complicated. It is very important to let each person give full play to his or her strengths in the position he or she is given. It is not that Taiwanese do not have an international outlook, but they are not accustomed to the existence of people who are different from us. There is no right or wrong culture, but we tend to put foreigners either too high or too low, without getting used to the fact that they have different thinking and values.Many people respond by adapting to what they perceive as the higher side and abandoning the lower side altogether, or by thinking that the lower side must conform to them. In fact, it is more important to find a third way between two different cultures and values, not to divide "either you or me" but to find "us," to enter into the cultural context and values of the other side, and to communicate in a way that he or she can understand.Evy Chang, head of investor relations at WiziinPhoto: Shihmin Fu, Digitimes, January 2021

Taiwan is the leader in many semiconductor sectors, but the "last mile" in terms of logistics and shipping centers is missing in the country - a gap that WPG Holdings is ready to fill with its plans to support the Taoyuan Aerotropolis project, according to Frank Yeh, vice chairman of the IC distributor.The last mile for logistics and shipping centers has been often held by Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, but WPG's LaaS (logistics as a service) digital transformation platform will play a major part in the development project around the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport to bridge that gap in the semiconductor supply chain, said Yeh.Yeh, who is in charge of digital transformation at WPG Holdings, noted that in terms of warehousing for leading US chip vendors, Qualcomm is mainly based in Singapore, Nvidia in Hong Kong, and Broadcom in Malaysia.But Taiwan plays an important role in the upstream semiconductor supply chain, with Taiwan's top design houses, such as MediaTek, and Rexchip and major chip vendors from the US and China, all relying on support from foundry houses, such as TSMC and UMC, from OSAT providers, such as ASE Technology Holding, and IC substrate suppliers, such as Unimicron, Yeh said.Among them, TSMC can provide one-stop services from wafer foundry to advanced packaging and testing for the most advanced chips such as Apple's APs and HPCs.Though the manufacturing of ICs is done in Taiwan, the shipping centers for them are not, said Yeh.WPG has seen its smart warehousing transforming from 1.0 and 2.0 to the present 3.0, which is the LaaS model, which will be further implemented in Taoyuan Aerotropolis, said Yeh.Yeh believes turning Taoyuan into a global shipping center and integrating into the supply chain the "warehousing OEM" model will make Taiwan's semiconductor supply chain a complete one - or an "Taiwan IDM," said Yeh.Yeh said this is the ultimate goal - turning Taiwan into a global semiconductor logistics center - of the MoU that WPG and Taoyuan Aerotropolis have singed.Yeh estimates that the logistics center should be able to start operation as early as 2024.Such smart warehousing operations at Taoyuan Aerotropolis will require considerable investment, but it will be neccessary if one needs to serve customers who set up factories in Vietnam or India amid the US-China trade war, said Yeh.WPG has first "practiced" from the Hong Kong warehouse and completed smart warehousing 1.0, Yeh said. Its operations in southern China serves Chinese customers and has regional functions, which is 2.0; and the warehouse in Taoyuan will be the smart warehousing 3.0 version, which is the most important and most comprehensive, he said.According to Yeh, in Singapore, for example, the management of semiconductor-related warehousing services is carried out in traditional ways, with only two warehouses and no value-added services, and the cost for clients is even higher. It is similar in Hong Kong.Customers are aware of these difficulties, but there is no better solution, Yeh said, adding if they can ship out the chips from warehouses in Taoyuan, the labor and time costs will be much lower.

COVID-19 and the US-China trade war have combined to accelerate a split of the global supply chain in two - namely a "G2" pattern with one serving China and the other the rest of the world. Such a scenario has also highlighted Taiwan's importance.Digitimes recently interviewed Frank Yeh, vice chairman of WPG Holdings - a leading IC distributor - as the world entered 2021 with coronavirus still wreaking havoc and the trade tensions between the superpowers raging on. Yeh talked about the future of supply chains and changes to the world.Q: What upgrades to the supply chain will smartization bring?A: I can say that all manufacturing industires are customers of WPG Holdings, but I do not understand manufacturing. I have read Digitimes president Colley Hwang's book "Disconnected ICT Supply Chains" at least three times.The broken supply chains, the US-China trade war that started two years ago, and the COVID-19 pandemic that began in early 2020 - they have combined to deal an enormous blow to the world. All the supply chains are changing. In 2019, everyone was busy running to Southeast Asia, and in 2020 they were not even able to reach there. The situation about broken supply chains will be more serious. Is this a crisis or an opportunity? Depending on how you look at it, it may be a great opportunity.What I want to do is to train myself, to train my mentality and way of thinking. What is really happening when we say the supply chains are broken? It is clear that the world's factory no longer exists. In the past, massive resources concentrated in China, from which products were delievered globally. This is changing. The G2 pattern resulted from the US-China trade war has gradually become the new normal, and the pandemic still seems to be raging on.In the traditional upstream-downstream communincation model, A may pass information directly to B, who then paases it to C. But in platform-style management, everyone shares information with each other, and nowadays with regionalization becoming the trend, digital platform management is becoming more and more important.Q: What are the changes in human lifestyles and industries that are worthy of attention in 2021?A: The concepts of remote work and co-presence will continues to be relevant. For example, online concerts and online inventors conferences. This echoes what I've mentioned before about getting "digital tools" ready to do these things. Taiwan's success in containing the epidemic has allowed study, work and social activities to remain normal without having to switch to the remote mode. But that has ironically limited their awareness of the fact that remote work and co-presence will be the new normal in the future.For companies, it is very important for managers to learn one thing, that is, managing without seeing employees. Do we pay for employees' time or employees' work results? Under the former model, employees might be late for work and get pay deducted. But if they can work from any places, what companies want are the results of their employees' work. This is the biggest change.For example, WPG's operations in the US have yet to allow employees to go into the offices. Of course the warehouses have to remain open, but offices of sales departments remain closed to employees. After the outbreak began, about 2000 WPG employees in China were unable to go into their offices starting February 1, 2020 until the end of March. And we have take note of the demographic changes - both qualitative and quantitative changes.Q: How do you see the impact of demographic changes on the industry?A: In the first half of 2020, Taiwan finally came to the point where the birth rate was lower than the death rate. According to the Ministry of the Interior, if there is no change in Taiwan's future birth plan, it is estimated that by 2049, Taiwan's total population will be less than 17 million. In light of these trends, when we talk about the issue of talent cultivation, the population size is not big enough with the people continuing aging and the number of children shrinking.These so-called digital natives have been accustomed to various digital devices since childhood and are familiar with the digital environment. Do they want to work in the same company for a long time? Or do they want to keep working for themselves? This is what is often referred to as the "slashie life" where one can get any information to do anything through digital platforms.If business leaders realize the importance of results, rather than the time employees spend on work, it is not necessary for employees to travel to Taipei (in nothern Taiwan) if they are in Hualien (in eastern Taiwan), and it is even possible for one person to serve multiple companies, and even for one company to serve multiple companies. As these global demographic changes continue to develop, we need to look at it not just for tomorrow, but for the next 10, 20 or 30 years.Q: What kind of changes will the industry face in the next 30 years and how should we deal with them?A: Since we are not just looking at tomorrow, but the longer-term future, we should also think about what we should do today at this point in time.In the past, industry competition only focused on the opponent, and all we thought about every day was the opponent's "A," and that I could respond with "A+B." But we might be able to defeat the opponent and yet end up a loser in the bigger perspective of an entire era. There have been too many such cases, such as companies focusing too much on dealing with opponents and forgetting the needs of customers. Is the future really all about competition? Are there any opportunities for cooperation? What areas should we compete in and what areas should we cooperate in? The future will be an era of coopetition. It is impossible for every company to be the industry leader, but there are still ways for others.In my opinion, companies should think about the vertical and horizontal aspects. For example, business and manufacturing areas are considered matters of vertical aspects. What is the horizontal aspects? We can think about the future era of big data. If a company hosts the main server on its own premises, then 10,000 companies means employing 10,000 server engineers? This is the horizontal aspect. I think for future logistics, we may consider the "sharing" approach, undergoing transformation to digital platforms.With the advent of the era of coopetition, coupled with the future demographic changes and new thinking, we must change in order to keep up with the times. A company is only a particular point; we must look at the bigger picture, namely how to operate an industry. WPG Holdings has been undergoing digital transformation for five years. I also think I am operating an industry.Q: How can we proceed from the perspective of electronics-related sectors?A: As an IC distributor, I have been thinking about how to help customer succeed. The core is the supply chain. There are four groups and 53 companies under WPG Holdings, and under the digital transformation strategy, we have been carrying out group optimization. We embrace the collective optimization of the value chain, all for the sake of the success of customers.Take the notebook industry as an example. There are at least 400-500 suppliers, and only through collective optimization can we have the opportunity to become a worldwide ecosystem. Through the collective optimization of the notebook industry, all relevant supply chains in Taiwan can have a grasp of the global notenook market. Just like the machinery tool industry: through multiple "lines" of several sectors the "surface" will be formed and eventually become an "ecosystem". In my opinion, underlying co-production, co-prosperity and co-creation is sharing.In the past, people sacrificed their holidays for work, or some people chose to sacrifice their jobs in order to retire early. Work and life were opposites. But if co-presence is enacted in the future, life and work can be mixed flexibly through the digital platform management. This is the so-called "workation." Even if we are in a beautiful mountain, we can still work as long as we have connection to the Internet. With networks and the clouds, everyone could work till 85 years old.Q: How can IC distributors face issues concerning regionalized supply chains and how can LaaS (logistics as a service) bring new values into play?A: The smart manufacturing supply chain is concerned with only one thing, that is, the cost resulting from time. If the time required is close to zero, the cost is also close to zero. For example, if the days of inventory are 30, they must be kept in the warehouse, and this is the cost. The semiconductor industry is committed to introducing intelligent factory automation to reduce time. These have gradually emerged as successful cases.But whether we can be of further help in the future, we always have to zero in on whether we can bring the successful experience to the next 30 years, and boldly dream about the next 30 years. For example, my personal dream is to continue working at 85, so what do I have to learn? This includes maintaining health and embracing the concept of workation.In 2020, for example, despite the challenges of the pandemic, many industries were still doing very well. For WPG, business has bene robust despite the pandemic, so what else do you need to think about? Of course, if we just look at tomorrow, it seems that we do not need to think much. But if it is 2030 or 2040 we are looking at, there will be surprisingly a lot.With the new business model of LaaS proposed by WPG, we can think of two things: first, whether the cost of transaction time can be close to zero; second, what the channel operators have to do, so that customers' transaction time can be close to zero, which may further be translated into energy savings and carbon reductions. In terms of transportation, materials are sent from WPG's warehouses to customers' warehouses, which is the traditional way. But in the future, they will be sent directly from WPG's warehouses to customers' assembly lines. Even blockchain and other technologies can be introduced.WPG distributes products from about 250 companies. Its warehouses receive shipments from around the world every day. They have to check the items and label them before storing them. After receiving orders, the warehouses need to prepare the items and ship them to clients, who, after receiving the shipments, will have to spend three days unloading and checking them. They will have to spend another three days moving the items to the assembly lines, where the items have to be checked and confirmed again.The warehouses and production lines belong to different departments, and every time you place an order, it necessarily involves time costs. It doesn't matter whether you employ manual labor or automated assembly lines; it's the same. It's particularly difficult to do inventory accounting for ICs that are so small. This is the current situation.But if the transaction time is shortened to zero, customers can reduce costs. IC distributors will not need to carry out the process of putting items into cartons and so on; they can send the items directly to the assembly lines. Are there big customers doing so? So far, we've only reached "particular points," so to speak. The key is how we can convince others to come on board, so we will continue promote the concept of coopetition.The chief operating officer of a client company pointed out that the LaaS model seems "too crazy to be possible." It is a very difficult approach, but the clients admits that it could be beneficial for clients.WPG Holdings vice chairman Frank YehPhoto: Michael Lee, Digitimes, January 2021

Many startups are confused about how to find angel investors, while investors are discouraged by the lack of transparency of information about startup investments. Nguyen Ngoc Tien (aka Tien Nguyen), founder and CEO of Wiziin Vietnam, saw this pain point and created a platform to connect investors with startups and quality SMEs, using artificial intelligence (AI) to help startups manage investor relationships and find potential investors, while giving investors real-time and accurate information of startups to help manage their portfolio.In a recent online interview, Digitimes talked to Nguyen to understand what value this new platform may create for the new venture ecosystem.Q: Could you briefly introduce your background? And what brought you to start your entrepreneurial journey?A: My background is business strategy. And in 2010, I started my first project in e-learning. And we provide the Mass Open Online Courses (MOOC) services for universities. After that startup, I created a new one in Hong Kong, offering cards for loyalty programs for, say, members of Chamber of Commerce. At that point of time, that businesses was very promising, because people used physical cards, but we offered them digital cards with which they could redeem their loyalty rewards. We then exited from this business to a Japanese investor.And then I created my third venture, an outsource platform for software. The Vietnamese engineers of that platform were excellent, and we offered good prices. The outsourcing industry bloom at that point of time allowed us to expand and invest more in other projects in Internet of Things (IoT) and social network.And in 2016, I got a scholarship from the Irish government to study in Ireland in strategy. Therefore, my main academic background is business strategy and military strategy. After that master's program, I went to Beijing, and did a project as a strategic researcher. At the same time, I remained an entrepreneur, I opened companies in Ireland and in England, respectively, both focusing on artificial intelligence and big data.At that point of time, by doing projects with my professors in University College Dublin and the Silicon Dock in Ireland, I realized the real roles and interactions of innovation-based startups and VCs. So I joined Act Venture Capital, which managed a fund of EUR500 million, backed by the European Central Bank. We invested in renewable energy projects, in biotech, and tech companies. I managed that for four years. And then I came back here in Vietnam, but I remain a limited partner (LP) of the firm.I realized that there is a gap in investment in the Asia Pacific region. It is also very difficult to do due-diligence because information sometimes is not very transparent, and not accurate. However, as an investor, we need to release the money. Keeping the money in our pocket is a waste. So that's why we try to narrow the gap by creating Wiziin. Wiziin is an investment platform where we try to collect transparent and accurate information from startups and investors and make them available real-time. And we not only have the matching services to provide for both, we also provide the tools. It costs startups a lot of time to maintain investor relationships to raise funds. Wiziin helps them maintain investor relations on the platform. Startups can focus on their daily operation activities, but when they need to raise funds, they can use Wiziin to find appropriate investors. And for the investors, by using the investor dashboard, they can keep track of whichever startups in their portfolio.I believe that we can create more options for both - not just for investors but also for entrepreneurs.Q: How does AI come to play at Wiziin? How do you make AI work for your platform?A: After years of experience working in big data and AI projects, as an investor, I understand that the first stage of AI should be data. When we try to find one good enough startup, we scan through thousands of startups, and do tons of work just to find the right ones. I realized that some of our analysts, sometimes they get lost in the job, and sometimes they are a little bit biased, when they try to do the initial screening for the startup.So, first, we gather data big enough for analysis. We have got more than 60,000 Vietnamese SMEs data ready for the platform. I believe in the future there will be more because we will expand coverage to entire Asia Pacific region. Why SME? Because in the region the number of SMEs is huge. And with that data, we need to calculate and analyze everything, but it is impossible to do so much work. So, we developed an AI bot that can program themselves. So, the bot programs itself every day by gathering data. When SMEs upload their data to us, such as financial data, operational data and founders' data, we collect everything with high level of privacy standards in order to fuel the investment decision making process.We collect four kinds of data: first, the background of the founding team. The second one is the technology that they use. Do they have patents, licenses? Anything like that. The third thing is market data, about the market and their market share. And the fourth is financial data: revenues, earnings, how much money the founders are putting into the company, etc. We also try our best to collect and analyze data from reliable third parties, like the government.After some analysis, our AI bot will generate an evaluation. So, through time we believe that our valuation will be as close as the valuation that happens in real life. And we try to introduce a kind of machine learning method so that the bot can program itself every day to keep it accurate. That transparent information can assist the decision-making efficiency for investors, because sometimes the investors do not really know what they like. Sometimes they got some policy or criteria to screen investments, but when they make a decision, sometimes it's very intuitive. So, we need a tool to take care of the SMEs and startups and also the buyer side and learn about their behavior. Only behaviour reflects investment decisions.Q: Can you explain more about learning the behavior? Also, do you let investors set up their own preferences?A: The backbone of our platform is that we learn from behavior. So we collect the historical behavior of the investor. For example, I got a case study, which is a local investor. We analyzed hundreds of cases that she already invested, and we realized that 80% of her portfolio has had something to do with sustainable environment or helping women in society.We learn from that, and then we can see she is a social-impact investor. She never told us about it, she probably had never realized that she wanted to invest in impact investment. But now we learn from that behavior. And then we suggest a list of companies heavy with social enterprises. We also have the features that investor can customize. But at the end of the day with the tons of data, it's better to let the AI bot do the job. Investors can set their customization, but that may not be necessary. But it's also the options they may choose.Q: So right now, your focus is still on Vietnam. Do you have plans for future expansions?A: Yes, we have focused on Vietnam. And our next strategy is to open this platgofrm for European investors. We also have plans for expansions in Southeast Asia by the end of 2021, so we can pull in more investors in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. Now we have some Indonesian SMEs on our platform and some from India. In 2022, if it goes smoothly, we hope to introduce the financial market, where we can introduce more options for investors. For example, investors currently can only invest in equity, like they can buy equity from SMEs, but in 2022 we hope that we can offer convertible notes, which means they can give loans to the SMEs and can convert to equity if the KPI do not match. Or we can create a kind of lending services from investors for SMEs with a suitable interest rate. But for that we will focus on Asia Pacific, because the SMEs in Vietnam may be not as many as those in the whole region; it's true also in terms of the number of investors. Especially the investors in Vietnam mainly are the government and some big corporate venture capital funds; there aren't many real investors with huge amounts here yet. The startup ecosystem here is: within more than 110 active funds, Vietnamese investors contribute 25%, another 25% from Singapore, and 17% from the US. In the future the numbers of European, Korean and Chinese VC will rise.On the other hand, we also see the importance of converting the individual traditional investor to venture investment, so that they can have more investment options with more risks and more rewards. This market helps us to scale, especially when we focus on Asia Pacific. So we must focus more on Asia Pacific in the next three to five years for enough volume of the market.Q: I see. So the SMEs you're referring to is not only the startups, you mean they can also be on the investor side?A: Yes, the SMEs mean those we connect from both sides and we work with as a platform - we work with stakeholders and investors. SMEs do not mean only startups. Startups are just a portion of it. We also aim at SMEs that can or want to integrate innovations into what they do, and SMEs that need funding. Even though they are traditional, they know that they want to have new ways of business, which we can help. So, the whole system is for small and medium enterprises, not only startups.Q: I suppose there are many hidden champions - which may be family businesses, but are very competitive in their technologies - that could be discovered by your platform. Is that your purpose of including SMEs which are not startups into your platform?A: Yes. Because for an economy like Vietnam, we don't have many tech firms yet, and we have more traditional enterprises. We need kind of synergies of both. It's not enough to have startups only; we have SMEs that know how to do business with a brand, have know-how, or need funds to grow their businesses. Many startups are good at technology, know about innovation, young, strong, but do not have enough experience in the market. So we want the whole ecosystem that can create synergies for themselves.Q: What is Vietnam's startup landscape right now? And how can both sides create synergy to optimize the value of collaboration?A: The Vietnamese startup ecosystem is quite young and has a lot of potential. Back in 2008, American firms like IDG venture invested in Vietnamese ICT companies, but they invested in software companies mostly. But now Samsung and Philips have set up factories here, and later this year Apple will also be investing here. I must say that this is the time of doing technology business. The government has encouraged this a lot; they put it into the Five-Year Economic Plan. And what Vietnam has now is the capability to make software, and capability of using some designs for hardware and mass production. But in the next 10 to 15 years, I would say that Vietnam will have the ability to design the hardware, semiconductor, and similar stuff. So, invest now; we know these businesses will bear fruit in the next five or 10 years. And the startup ecosystem will be crowded very soon, because after Vietnam and EU signed the Free Trade Agreement, European VCs are now aware of this market and will want to jump on the bandwagon here, like Japan. The Japanese also have VCs around here. They have some tractions in this market. So, as I will say this is the right time for investors to get into the market. And as an investor, we can consider Vietnam as a player with the ability of creating high value products, not just a market with a huge population. A population of more than 90 million is remarkable, so there is great potential that will materialize in the next five or 10 years.Q: Can you talk more about Vietnam's design capability?A: We're talking about the next 10 to 15 years. In the case of eSilicon (which designs and manufactures digital CMOS and finFET ASICs chips), they are based in Silicon Valley, but 80% of their engineers are Vietnamese. And they have managed to sell the company at US$216 million to Inphi. They hire Vietnamese engineers for design work and then they send those engineers to Silicon Valley to work for the mother company. I believe that in the next 10 to 15 years, when these engineers want to return and contribute to Vietnam, that is the right time for a wave of hardware creation and production.And there's a company that we work with - Akselos.About 90% of their engineers are Vietnamese. It is an Internet of Things (IoT) company that creates the world's fastest and most advanced engineering simulation technology. So normally, if you have a failed wind turbine in the sea, it will take more than three weeks to send the engineer up, take it down, and then fix it.Akselos has a solution, which takes just three hours: they can detect everything that happened via sensor data, and send the engineers up to fix it. So Akselos has US$10 million from Shell as a grant. And that's a very interesting case about a Vietnamese engineers that can work for a global firm. So I believe in the human resources and entrepreneurial spirit, especially in the ability and the ambition of the founders. We can find good talent here. We don't have advanced technology yet, but we will in a very near future.Q: How can Taiwan and Vietnam work together to create synergy?A: In my opinion, let's have a look at the strengths and weaknesses. We must say that Taiwanese technology is remarkable in the world, everybody knows that. But there are limitations of the island. I seem similarities between Ireland, where I lived several years, and Taiwan. In Ireland, they just have five million people. But Ireland has great industry, so we invested in the technology companies located in the Silicon Dock in Dublin, continental Europe and America.And investment will be the key for Taiwan, to reach new markets, to create more value and create more jobs. So I believe that investment in a growing country is what Taiwanese companies should have a look at. I believe that Taiwanese firms can invest in technology in Vietnam, Indonesia, in the ASEAN region. So people can see the value that Taiwanese company can add to those economies. The Taiwanese companies then can own some pieces of the bigger pie. Not limited to the Taiwanese pie but enjoy the pie of the whole region. What is Taiwan's advantage? I believe that is the advanced technology, especially hardware, and stable financial resources.This can be suitable for the ecosystem in Southeast Asia. The key is investment in technology around this region. And also, in the next five or 10 years, I believe that we can be a place to mobilize investments to other countries. Because the FTA that we have signed with other countries, there are hot money chasing after technology, so we can also mobilize the investments from Vietnam to some companies in Taiwan and create more jobs. For Taiwan, investing overseas is the key.Wiziin CEO Tien NguyenPhoto: Company