Malaysia is one of the emphatic success stories among the Tiger economies of the Far East, but wages have risen so much, and there is now so little surplus labour that the country can no longer afford to pitch for its traditional chip assembly business, Reuter reports from Kuala Lumpur: We have to modernise to offset rising labour costs, says Roger Bertelson, head of the Malaysian American Electronics Industry, which brings together 16 US firms; Malaysia’s microchip industry has graduated from labour-intensive industry to high-technology computer-driven industry, said Bertelson, managing director of Motorola Malaysia Sdn Bhd – Malaysia is no longer an assembly centre; after six straight years of 8% economic growth or better, wages in Malaysia are now higher than in most other Asian countries and are rising at more than 9% a year; Toshiba Corp plans to fabricate 500,000 4M-bit memory chips a month at its existing semiconductor assembly plant in Malaysia, and NEC Corp and Lion Group Sdn Bhd say they will set up separate plants the first in Malaysia, to make compact disk-read only memory drives.
