Word from the Wall Street Journal’s man in Malaysia is watch out for Borneo. The tropical island has already attracted disk platter maker Komag Inc, which is building a $100m factory in a new industrial park on the outskirts of Kuching the 400,000- population capital of Malaysian Borneo. At the end of the year, Zycon Corp is due to open a $29m plant to make multi-layer printed circuit boards in the park. Several Komag suppliers are also expected to open factories nearby over the next two years, and the Sarawak state government is hopeful that talks with an unidentified US company will lead to it building a big wafer fab. A key attraction for would-be inward investors is that a large proportion of the population speaks some English. Three-quarters of the island, which also includes the tiny sultanate of Brunei, is Indonesian.
