Reserach Express@NCKU

NCKU’s delegation

Led by Michael M. C. Lai, President of National Cheng Kung University and invited and hosted by Wen-Long Hsu, Founder, Jau-Yang Ho, President and Ching-Siang Liao chairman of the board of Chi Mei Corporation, a delegation of NCKU leaders spent the entire day at the company corporate headquarters and its massive facilities in Southern Taiwan Science Park.

Members of NCKU’s delegation, besides Academician Lai, are the following:

Da Hsuan Feng, Senior Executive Vice President
Tommy Tzeng, Vice President for Research and Development
Y. H. Chang, Dean of Management
Andy Fuh, Dean of Science
Wen-Teng Wu, Dean of Engineering
Jen-Sue Chen, Chair of Materials Science and Engineering
Wei-Chou Hsu, Chair of Electrical Engineering
Jiin-Yuh Jang, Chair of Mechanical Engineering
Yan-Ten Lu, Chair of Physics
Hung-Shan Weng, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Former President

The day began at 8:30 am in the morning of November 23 and ended at 4:00 pm. At the end of the visit, I can detect that all delegation members were intellectually and physically drained! I will explain why!

Something about CMO

In the past several decades, Chi-Mei Corporation is rapidly rising as one of the most powerful global corporations in Asia Pacific Basin. Its corporate headquarters is in Tainan, Taiwan, which is about half an hour by car from National Cheng Kung University through the winding roads of ancient Tainan.

The company, Chi-Mei, which I would like to translate as “Mysterious Beauty,” has ubiquitous business interests, ranging from chemical and food production to now an undisputed global leader in display panel production. It was founded by Mr. Wen-Long Hsu, a renaissance man of multiple talents, from being a recent violin playing partner of NCKU’s president Academician Michael Lai, to museum curator for founding one of Taiwan’s most comprehensive “free-of-charge” artistic museums on the fifth to eighth floor of its corporate headquarters (with, as expected, many Stradivarius violins) to profound and fast thinking entrepreneur.

According to Mr. Jau-Yang Ho, President of CMO (the electronics subsidiary of Chi-Mei Group,) who is also one of NCKU’s 120,000 alumni worldwide and became a recent prestigious NCKU distinguished alumni laureate, and displayed phenomenal knowledge of the company’s broad and deep information, the company is now galloping at 40% growth annually, and will soon reach $20 billion (U.S.) annual revenue in 2007/8. In addition, it will be aggressively moving into many different new but related industries, which shows the company’s understanding of the world’s market, in order to further its growth in business. Unquestionably, CMO today is not only an economic engine of Southern Taiwan, but Taiwan and Asia in general.

Although I visited Southern Taiwan Science Park (STSIPA http://www.stsipa.gov.tw/) a few years back, this was my first visit since I assumed my position in NCKU. In the past two months I have often seen it from afar while traveling at 180 miles an hour on the train of Taiwan High Speed Rail system. So except for getting a zipping through impression of wide boulevards and large buildings, I was not able to see much. For sure, until this visit, I did not have an in-depth understanding and impression of the scale of the operations of STSIPA.

Today, NCKU’s delegation was given a panoramic view, inside and outside.

I am very happy to notice immediately that our “tour guide” was none other then our distinguished alumnus, President Ho himself, who stayed with us throughout the day. We first went to one of the gigantic CMO buildings in STSIPA, where Mr. Ho gave us a tour of the display room, followed by an in-depth presentation of CM group in general and CMO in particular. It was from this presentation I began to realize the scale and depth of the company.

Let me say a few words about the company’s manufacturing clean room facility. The one we visited is the so-called 6th generation panel display facility. It can house, I was told, some six football fields in area, and it has some 4 floors (thus 24 football fields in total!). I should mention that there are many equally large, if not bigger facilities in the park, along with many other companies.

Entering the clean room facility, which mostly is class-1000, with scattered areas of class 10 (and even class 1) require delegation members to “suit-up.” I always thought that from seeing from afar that suiting up in this manner would be suffocating, but this experience told me that it was really quite pleasant, although I have to admit that walking around for at least “several miles” inside the facility made me sweat quite a bit.

The manufacturing facility we visited is entirely computer controlled, and all motions were carried out by robots. When asked whether the facility is runned at 24x7, Mr. Ho suddenly turned into an enthusiastic entrepreneur and replied that

“not only should it be 24x7, but we measured by how many seconds we lost if ever the facility stops function. We measured our production, thus money making process, with production in number of seconds in time. In fact, if power goes down, the power supplier needs to compensate us because that means significant monitory, hence profit, loss!”

With such emphatic determination, it is no wonder that Chi-Mei is now the world leader in panel display production.

There is no question that each science park in the world needs an ICON. In Silicon Valley, HP and CISCO assume this role. In Seattle, it is Microsoft. In Hsinchu’s Science Park in northern Taiwan, it is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, or TSMC.

Looking at the vast areas and rapid growth of STSCPA, if not already, Chi-Mei is rapidly assuming the ICON status!

Lunch and discussion with CMO leaders

Lunch was held in Tainan’s city corporate headquarters, with the two leaders Mr. Hsu and Academician Lai, greeting each other as old friends. As I mentioned earlier, these two individuals became “violin partners” ever since Lai assumed the presidency of NCKU. Both, with deep interest in music, believed intuitively that education is far more important than “training.”

Discussions between the two groups, NCKU and CMO leaders could be summarized as follows (according to me, since no one took notes and so I did this through memory. Hence mistakes are mine!)

All agreed that CMO and NCKU have a special relation, which was developed in the last four decades. Indeed, even Mr. Hsu himself, who did not study in NCKU, was closely linked with the university for the past decades. All agreed that with the new leadership of President Lai, the timing is perfect for this collaboration.
It is interesting that in any region, having only industries without powerful university or universities is like a “one spouse marriage!” In Silicon Valley, besides HP and CISCO, there are Stanford and UC Berkeley. In Boston, there are defense industries (such as Raytheon) and universities (such as Harvard and MIT). In San Diego, there is bio-economy and UCSD. In Seattle, there are Microsoft and Boeing and University of Washington. So, it is interesting that Chi-Mei and NCKU are the partners of this “marriage,” especially when individuals from both organizations have such deep and intertwining relations (one of NCKU’s most distinguished professor is an independent member of the board of Chi-Mei, for example.)
The economic and intellectual successes of the region of southern Taiwan will be driven by high quality people. High quality people will demand not only exciting professional careers, such as those provided by Chi-Mei and NCKU, they also will demand quality of life, which range from having exciting cultural activities to schools for their children. There is no question that when Chi-Mei and NCKU work synergistically and complementarily, this can and will happen.
Mr. Ho gave the most heart warming summary of the day. He said that as far as Chi-Mei is concerned, developing a deeper and closer relation with NCKU is a “natural.” He also said that becoming a distinguished alumnus this year is one of the highlights of his life. Ever since he completed his education in NCKU nearly four decades ago, he came to work for Chi-Mei. So CMO is his first and last company. In today’s fast changing jobs landscape, this is LOYALTY! More over, in recent years, according to Mr. Ho, that it is becoming completely transparent that CMO has reached the point where developing a global reputation is no longer an option, but a must. To this end, both groups at the luncheon agreed that a closer collaboration will allow CMO and NCKU to assume global “icon” status for our region.
True to his high quality leadership, Mr. Ho was philosophical when he said that “opto-electronics” not only involves science and technology, it also is one area where “seeing” is critical. This is true whether one is talking about the most advanced TVs or the best display of breast cancer images. Both NCKU and Chi-Mei are now deeply involved in this area, with expertise, both in knowledge and businesses, that range from “panel display production” to biomedical photonics engineering. By seamlessly amalgamating both may and can have the effect of rendering the southern Taiwan region to become a world’s most exciting “OPTICS VALLEY!”
A reality in Taiwan is the Government’s incommensurate support of north and south. However, during our discussion, this “wei-ji” was viewed as an incentive for boosting collaborations between academia and industry, especially those driven by intellectual innovations. Interestingly, it was noted that in order for CMO to be a world leading player in its business, it needs to invest annually 200 billion NTD (roughly $6 billion US) in physical infrastructure. Mr. Ho also mentioned that due to the extreme rapid change of panel display market, one of CMO’s most serious challenges is to find and keep large number of well educated individuals to propel the business. On the other hand, it was recognized by all around the table that only world-class universities will attract first-rate students. World class universities are built solely on human intellectual underpinnings. An example was mentioned about the 1972 recruitment of Willis Lamb, a Nobel laureate in physics from Yale University to the University of Arizona. The arrival of Lamb was followed by a significant number of truly greats. In a sense, Lamb was de facto the genesis of Tucson’s transformation to eventually becoming the world’s most robust “optics valley.” With this in mind, it seems logical that CMO could consider investing a few percent of its total investments as incentive to attract world’s best to our region. This will for sure produce a deep and profound impact on boosting the human resource quantity and quality, from students to faculty. It can have the profound impact of sowing the seed to greater prosperity for all concerned in the (near) future.
One of the responsibilities of NCKU is thus clear. We need to become a world renowned university as rapidly as possible, so that we can attract more and more world class students, such as Mr. Ho, to feed into industries in the region. With us as the economic engine of the region, I cannot think of anything that can have more profound impact than this mission.