An Interview With Mark Ding, President of SEMI China

Mark Ding was appointed to the position of president for SEMI China in December. He succeeds Yee-Ming Ting, who served as SEMI China's first president, and retired earlier in the year. Ding is in charge of the association's relationships with its members, as well as industry, government and academia in the region. He will oversee all SEMI operations in Beijing and Shanghai.

Ding was born in Shanghai, raised in Jiangsu province, and graduated from Peking University with a bachelor's degree in physical chemistry. He also holds an M.S. in chemistry from the University of California, Irvine, and an M.B.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Prior to joining SEMI, Ding served as the director of China Business Development for Credence Systems Corp. Before that, he was vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Flashcomm/Silvaco International Inc.; a sales engineer at Deutsch Research Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.); and a sales and product manager with the Huaguang High-Tech Group (Beijing). During his years in Silicon Valley, Ding held leading volunteer positions in the Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association (CASPA), an organization dedicated to professional development, industry information and networking.

SI: Can you give us a quick snapshot of the semiconductor industry in China?

Ding: China is becoming the global center of electronics manufacturing. With so many products being manufactured here, semiconductor consumption is rising very fast and has outpaced the domestic production. That's the main reason that now you can see many fabs going in here, and all the building in China. There is a tremendous interest in building a local IC infrastructure. China is the fastest growing semiconductor market in terms of the consumption, and is expected to grow two to three times faster than the world average over the next several years. The China market share of global semiconductor consumption is forecasted to grow from about 12% of the worldwide market in 2002 to 21% in 2007, according to the analysts. (Statistics show the China IC market is currently $20B and the forecast for 2004 is $25B).

So there are lots of fabs under development right now. There are about 25 fabs in China that produce discrete and IC devices. Discretes are still a very big market for China. Approximately another 20 fabs are planned over the next five years. Most of those fabs are focused on newer technology. Advanced technology is primarily going toward the foundry facilities, such as SMIC or Grace Semiconductor and, now TSMC and Hue-Chin. Those are the top four foundry-based businesses.

SI: How big is the equipment and materials market in China?

Ding: SEMI is a member-driven company, and we have lots of members that have tremendous interest in this region now, mainly for equipment and materials. We now estimate that the market for equipment this year is about 1.2 billion. Of course, we are not quite happy about these estimations because the estimates for the size of the equipment market range widely. One of the issues is confidence in the available data for manufacturing and capital spending here. Our members and the industry at large need more reliable information on which to base business decisions. One of my goals as new president is to work more in this area, trying to provide more accurate market information to the industry.

China is playing a more important role in the worldwide market, so it's important for SEMI to have good coverage in this area, so that the overall worldwide expenditure would be correct. Helping with that, we have to locally have an infrastructure to get this data.

SI: What are your main goals as the new president of SEMI China?

Ding: I was born in China, and I feel very fortunate to assist the development of China's semiconductor industry. This is an exciting and rewarding time to be here. I hope to do a few things. First is to improve the availability of and quality of market information. I also hope to build stronger relationships and improve networking to help our members better communicate with the government and with the customers here. Also, SEMI has standards, and I hope as the development of many fabs here in China and the industry develops, I hope we can accelerate the use and development of standards in China — maybe make them available in Chinese and work with the government bodies to make them more easily accessible.