UTAR Centre for Corporate and Community Development (CCCD), in collaboration with Phison Electronics Corporation, organised the “CEO Talk Series: Choice 选择” via Zoom on 24 February 2022. The webinar was delivered in Mandarin and received over 100 participants.

The invited speaker was the founder and CEO of Phison Electronics Corporation, Datuk Pua Khein-Seng. The webinar was moderated by Division of Community and International Networking (DCInterNet) Deputy Director Dr Chen, I-Chi.

Datuk Pua started his talk by giving an overview of being an integrated circuit (IC) designer and encouraging UTAR students to join Phison after they graduate from UTAR.  “The main reason for the presentation today is to encourage more talents to join this field and become IC designers. We found that there is a lack of human resources in the IC design sector in the world, no matter in the United States, Korea or China. As the leader in the global IC designer on NAND flash controller domain, Phison now welcomes Malaysian students who are interested in IC design to join us. As I observed, many who are interested in the IC design sector do find it very difficult to take it as a career path due to the limitation of opportunities in Malaysia.”

Datuk Pua encouraged UTAR students who are keen to pursue a career in chip design to join Phison. He said, “Malaysia’s electrical and electronics (E&E) industry does not have a mature ecosystem for IC design. After graduating from UTAR, students who are interested in this field can either choose to study abroad or work in Phison. In Phison, we train our staff from zero to one. We will provide you with a conducive environment for learning and nurture your talent. After two years in Phison, we guarantee that you will acquire knowledge and technology that you could not learn from the textbooks. In addition, IC designers in Taiwan get high salaries.”

“Phison is famous for memory playing, specialising in NAND flash controller, IC design as well as NAND storage solutions. The storage chips and devices are the foundation of technologies because almost every electronic device needs storage. Our customer base includes companies from communications, financial services, transport, industrial and home entertainment such as Kingston, Asus, Sony, Canon, MSi, Western Digital, Philips, Alibaba.com, Tesla and Facebook. Our challenge today is that we are receiving many orders from our customers but we do not have sufficient team members to handle those projects. We definitely need more young Malaysian talents to join our company,” he admitted.

“I was born in a farming community in Sekinchan Selangor, Malaysia. In 1993, at the age of 19, I came to Taiwan for study with only US$4,000 in my pocket. I took a four-year degree programme at National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) and completed my master’s degree after another two years. After graduating from NCTU, I chose to become an entrepreneur and founded Phison Electronics with another four friends of mine. Phison was deemed as an unpromising company when it was first established, however, now Phison has become the top 10 earning companies in Taiwan as well as a global leader in NAND Flash controller IC and storage solutions. At present, with over 20 years of development, Phison has more than 2,000 worldwide patents. Its revenue grew and recorded US$2.23billion in the financial year 2021,” enthused Datuk Pua.

According to Datuk Pua, the name “Phi-son” means Five Persons, which signifies its five co-founders who started the company as fresh graduates. In the year 2000, Phison developed the world’s first single-chip USB flash drive controller, and successfully launched the USB-based product called Pen Drive. Datuk Pua said, “Now we have created a wide range of innovative solutions over SSD, eMMC, UFS, SD and USB interfaces. We also provide system integration and total solution services across consumer, industrial, automotive, gaming, embedded ODM, and enterprise markets. From 2015 to present, the production value of Phison was ranked in the top 4 of IC Design Houses in Taiwan IC design industry.”

“The flash memory market will remain strong and I have confidence that Phison will continue to experience business growth, especially when the fifth generation (5G) which will result in data explosion; the demand for NAND flash memory will increase. As long as society continues to use smartphones, electric vehicles and data centres, we will always be a relevant memory player,” Datuk Pua said and added, “Phison will always open the door for Malaysian students. We hope that you will choose to become part of us to bring change to the world.”

Towards the end of the webinar, Datuk Pua also spoke about wages and benefits provided by Phison to its workers. He also welcomed students to do an internship in his company. The webinar then saw an active interaction between the speaker and the participants. It ended with an extensive yet insightful Q&A session.

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