Newswise — High-tech companies in the Asia Pacific region (APAC)--including many American companies--have job openings for engineers, information technology specialists, and other technical professionals. Among those hiring for expanded, and sometimes new, facilities in the region is Intel, which is ready to fill more than 450 engineering slots in a variety of disciplines across virtually all of its facilities in APAC. "In Asia, we continue to invest in both existing and new factories and design centers," says an Asia-based Intel spokesman. Altera, the field-programmable gate-array (FPGA) and application-specific IC (ASIC) specialist, had 180 job openings at this writing, 106 of them in China, Japan, and Malaysia. About 85 percent of these jobs call for engineers. Most of these positions are in Malaysia where Altera employs more people than it does in its San Jose headquarters. A human resources source at Altera said the company expected to add at least 10 additional technical job openings for the region in July, primarily in Penang.
Applied Materials opened a new $60 million Singapore Operations Center in April. It's the company's first facility in Asia for manufacturing its semiconductor equipment, and will serve as the hub for its semiconductor equipment manufacturing around the world. Applied says it expects to double its workforce at the center in the next two years to 800 people, at least 85 percent of whom will be engineers. "With more than 70 percent of our semiconductor business in Asia, we expect 50 percent of our global semiconductor equipment supply to flow through this center in the next few years as we consolidate key parts of our manufacturing and various global and pan-Asia support functions in Singapore," says Mike Splinter, chairman and CEO of Applied Materials. Analog Devices opened a new development facility in Bangalore, India in May. No employment numbers are available, but president and CEO Jerald Fishman says he expects the India Product Development Center to play an increasingly important role in helping the company bolster its technology expertise and bring new technology to its customers. Hewlett-Packard Singapore plans to hire more than 50 people in the remaining months of 2010, including product design engineers and specialists in telecommunications and networking, IT services, and software engineering and development. HP also recently listed 14 engineering jobs in China on Asian.Jobs.com, about half of them for software engineers. "The job market here is very competitive," says Krynn Ng, a sourcing consultant for HP Singapore. Agilent Technologies, which was spun out of HP in 1999 to concentrate on the test and measurements market, increased its hiring of tech professionals significantly this year in Malaysia, with about half of the new hires in that country representing a "fresh increase," and the rest attrition replacements. Namdev More, senior HR manager for Mentor Graphics in India, is projecting about 35 new hires for Mentor over the rest of the year, mainly product design engineers, software engineers, and application engineers, but More says Mentor is looking for people with specific skill sets, such as EDA tools development and applications development. Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent may soon establish its global services headquarters in India, according to a bulletin from the Electronic Industries Association of India (ELCINA). The move is rumored to involve a $500 million investment and would take 36 months to complete. The shift, if the company decides to make it, would follow Nokia Siemens' 2008 relocation of its services headquarters to India; this unit reportedly now accounts for more than 45 percent of the company's revenue. Adlink Technology, Inc., which offers a wide range of embedded computing products and services to the test, process control, and communications sectors, opened a Shanghai Operations Center in June. The 36 000-square-meters facility is three times larger than the company's Taipei headquarters and Adlink executives expect the expansion to significantly improve their ability to design and manufacture products for the Chinese market. Samplify Systems, a leading provider of signal-compression technology, and TEGAM, Inc., which designs and makes electronic test equipment, also very recently opened new facilities in China. Seoul Semiconductor, recently ranked as the world's fourth largest LED supplier by sales volume, is also hiring, mainly at its home facilities, says Doug Hardman, the company's North American director of marketing. "We're expanding as fast as possible," he says. Specific requirements include process control engineers and manufacturing engineers. "We're looking for people who know how to set up production lines," notes Hardman. In one particularly interesting development, Baidu Inc., China's leading search engine, has started hiring software engineers directly from the United States. Baidu says it plans to hire at least 30 mid- and senior-level software engineers from Silicon Valley. The plan, according to a Baidu spokesperson, is to expand its technological capabilities and boost its global profile. The Baidu announcement followed Google's much publicized plan to relocate its China servers to Hong Kong following its well-publicized debate with Beijing over censorship.
MICROSOFT ADDS FOCUSMicrosoft has had a significant presence in APAC for several years, including four major facilities in India. And while it doesn't publicly disclose details of its technical personnel recruiting, Microsoft Research has published a list of the t ype of technical, full-time positions it's looking for, aligned into four groups: research software development engineers who would collaborate with research engineers; software development engineers working in a more traditional product-development role; program managers who would work closely with customers in small, dynamic teams; and software development engineers who can write test programs and develop test tools. Other Microsoft Research operations in India and China have also narrowed their focus to specific applications and markets. In India, for example, its research groups are currently focused on seven major areas: algorithms research, cryptography/security/applied mathematics, mobility/networks/systems, multilingual systems, software engineering, vision/graphics/visualization, and technology for emerging markets. Microsoft Research Asia also has R&D programs underway in natural user interfaces, next-generation multimedia, data intensive computing, search and online ads, and computer science fundamentals. Australia is a much smaller opportunity for engineers and other tech professionals. The MyCareer Website lists 400 EE jobs available in the entire country. Most are in transmission, power, building design, and even pipeline applications, with a few positions for product design, project engineers, tech support, and senior system design engineers. One new development is a partnership between Alcatel-Lucent's research arm, Bell Labs, and the University of Melbourne to establish a research center in Melbourne that will be devoted to innovation in energy-efficient networks and technologies. The facility, to be called the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications, will have a staff of researchers that will build up to 22 over the next three years. The IBM Research Computational Biology Center also has announced plans to collaborate with scientists from the Victorian Life Sciences Computational Initiative at the University of Melbourne to study human disease. IBM researchers will co-locate with university scientists. At least 10 000 science and medical researchers are expected to team with IBM's computational biology specialists during the research program.
ODMs THRIVEAPAC-based electronics manufacturing services (EMS) and original design manufacturers (ODM), which design and manufacture products for many of the industry's largest customers, also continue to thrive. EMS and ODM growth has been particularly impressive in China and Taiwan. Thomas Dinges, an EMS and ODM analyst for iSuppli, the market research firm, estimates the ODM market at $160 billion for 2010, up from $121 billion in 2009. "The 10 largest ODMs represent at least 85 percent of industry revenue," says Dinges. "We don't have a regional breakdown, but in terms of factory production, more than 80 percent of production capacity is in mainland China." Jeffrey Wu, a senior analyst at iSuppli, says Taiwanese ODMs and EMS providers produced 88.3 percent of worldwide mobile PC shipments in 2009. "This figure may increase by more than 10 percent in 2010." Singapore-based Flextronics, probably the largest ODM, announced in October 2009 that it planned to hire 7000 people in China by the end of that year to meet contract demands. No breakdown was given for EEs or other tech professionals, but Flextronics recently listed about 60 openings for engineers on a regional Web site in several facilities in Shanghai, China, and Penang. Flextronics is also building a new design center in Wuzhong to meet the growing demand for computing products in China. The new facility is expected to be completed by the end of 2010. It's not always clear if these companies are seeking "local" technical talent, but job descriptions often suggest or even specify language skills requirements. This is especially true of managers, or if travel is part of the job.
IT SECTOR REMAINS STRONGSoftware development and IT are two areas that are among the fastest growing in terms of job opportunities, which is one of the reasons Microsoft says it developed the Microsoft IT Academy, a membership-based organization that offers IT training and resources to schools. But Professor Keith Kelly, who works with the Northwestern Michigan University's Computer Information Technology Program, which participates in the Microsoft IT Academy, says he's not convinced that a college-issued degree alone is enough to land an IT job. "I think employers really want to see both degrees and industry certifications," he says. India and China remain the undisputed leaders in offshore IT and business process outsourcing services in the Asia Pacific region. However, a number of countries are making considerable investments in this area and positioning themselves as credible alternatives, according to Gartner, Inc., a leading IT research and advisory group. Gartner expects IT spending in China to reach $216.7 billion in 2010, a 5.9 percent increase from last year. Uko Tian, principal research analyst at Gartner, says, "China has placed the development of the IT industry high on its list of priorities and stresses the wide appliabiilty of IT in economic and social fields." Demand from Chinese companies for expertise in emerging technologies like software-as-a-service (SaaS), visualization, cloud computing, and unified communications is growing. Green IT is a lower priority but rising, according to Tian. "IT vendors should help their channel partners continue to build skills sets around these emerging technologies, as spending on these technologies may help drive IT spending to 2013 and beyond."
UNEXPECTED GAINSA new report by Gartner says countries such as Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam have continued to strengthen their positions in IT services against traditional leaders, like India, while Indonesia made the top 10 list of locations for IT services in APAC for the first time. According to the report, while India continues to grow in terms of exporting its IT services, its relative share of the overall worldwide market total has declined. "Many countries trying to improve their positions in this market are reassessing their strategy and looking at niche markets like call centers, logistics, and other back-office functions where they might have a physical proximity advantage over mature countries like Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore." Meanwhile, India is not resting on its laurelss. ELCINA, India's electronics trade association, reports on its Web site that the country's Department of Information Technology is considering forming a unit to attract multi-billion dollar investments in IT hardware manufacturing, which is currently valued at $43 billiion. The department thinks it can grow to $155 billion over the next few decades, according to ELCINA. Research by Business Today, part of the India Today Group, with the help of the market research agency Synovate, recently disclosed that Wipro, one of India's leading IT service providers, has already hired 2500 engineering graduates this year, as well as 1300 under its Wipro Academy of Software Excellence program, and that Wipro plans to continue to recruit highly qualified engineers and other technical personnel over the next several months. Wipro's own recruiting site recently listed 109 technical positions in Australia, New Zealand, China, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. But at least two APAC-focused job sites recently listed a total of more than 800 technical openings for Wipro, all of them in India. Business Today also reported that the Microsoft India Development Center has added nearly 100 graduates from top India-based engineering universities to its staff so far this year and suggested that additional hiring was likely. Other IT specialists in the APAC region, including the top Indian firms like Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies, and HCL Technologies, will likely continue to expand, according to another study commissioned by Savvis, Inc., a provider of cloud infrastructure and IT services. More IT jobs may be opening; the Savvis study predicts the number of companies that outsource their IT infrastructure will increase globally from 17 percent today to 64 percent in 2020. The survey cites Singapore as an example, projecting that in-house IT activities there will drop from 62 percent today to 38 percent in 2020. (Infosys reported a net addition of 1026 employees for the first quarter of this year.)
WELLNESS DOING WELLOne of the hottest job generators for technical professionals in APAC is medical devices. Pawel Suwinski, the principal consultant of a new market study by Frost & Sullivan's Healthcare Practice APAC, is projecting the medical device market in the APAC region will almost double the rate of growth of the rest of the world, but that Asia is suffering from a chronic shortage of technical personnel in this market. "We can only predict that this shortage will become more acute." Suwinski expects the deemand for interdisciplinary products will create opportunities for bioinformatics, bioengineering, and biotechnology specialists. But he believes the lack of technical biomed/engineering talent in the region has already led some key industry players to hold off shifting or establishing any manufacturing in the area--facilities that would potentially create hundreds if not thousands of n ew jobs. As a result, he says that many of the openings for the skill sets that will be needed will have to be imported. Singapore may be the exception. The infocomm Technology Division of International Enterprise Singapore says that one of the brighter spots for high-tech job opportunities in this market is in its own back yard. At least 10 of the leading global medtech companies have already set up regional facilities in the area, including Johnson & Johnson, Roche Diagnostics, Siemens Medical Instruments, and Boston Scientific. These and other companies were able to fill many of their requirements for technical professionals with engineers who managed to shift from Singapore's declining disk drive business to the emerging medical technology sector. New engineering graduates from the area don't seem to have much downtime. "Our grads are doing very well in finding jobs," says Professor Mohan S. Kankanhalli, Vice-Dean of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. "Most of our undergraduates find jobs in Singapore. But our Masters students find jobs in the entire region, which is basically the whole of Asia, and our Ph.D. graduates are placed internationally though most of them find jobs in Asia."
About Ron Schneiderman:Ron Schneiderman is a contributing editor for Electronic Design and Vision Magazines. He's the author of seven books, including "Technology Lost--Hype and Reality in the Digital Age." Schneiderman also organizes and moderates the Tech Insider Series of Webinars for IEEE Spectrum Online.
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