Site:

LIKOM PCB Sdn. Bhd. - Malacca, Malaysia
Kawasan Perindustrian Cheng, Fasa III, Mukim Cheng, Daerah Melaka Tengah
75250 Melaka, Malaysia

Participants:

Francis Khoo T. C., Assistant General Manager
William Loo, International Marketing Executive
Frankie Ng, International Marketing Executive
Choy Kok Leong, Project Manager

Mission and Strategy

• LIKOM is part of Lion Land, which is a member of the Lion Corporation, an investment and services group with over $2.5 billion capitalization. The Lion Corporation has a wide variety of companies, including steel manufacturing, assembly and marketing of automobiles, life insurance, container manufacturing, property construction, chocolate manufacturing, and trading.
• LIKOM, established in 1992, calls itself "the biggest OEM technopolis in Asia." Its current capitalization is over $100 million and supports a vertically integrated facility with the following capabilities:
  • design and manufacturing of color monitors
  • design and manufacturing of switching power supplies, keyboards, casings, and precision plastics
  • design and manufacturing of motherboards, PCB assemblies, multimedia and PC system unit assemblies
  • tooling design for plastic injection molding
  • metal stamping and complete spray painting process for computer casings
  • double and multilayer PCB fabrication
• The first customer of LIKOM in 1992 was Apple Computer. Today 75% - 80% of LIKOM's customer base consists of Japanese companies.

Key Elements of Presentation

• LIKOM occupies 1.1 million square feet on 92 acres located in Malacca Technology Park. The Malacca location offers abundant industrial land, close proximity to air and sea ports, licensed manufacturing warehouse (duty free trade zone), and favorable support from government and local authorities.
• Malaysia offers duty advantages under GSP for the United States and Europe, dependent upon the amount of local content, and there are several major component and subsystem manufacturers located close within Malaysia: Intel, TI, National Semiconductor, TEAC, Mitsumi, Seagate, Conner, and Astec.

Key Elements of Tour

• LIKOM provides hostels, meals and transportation for its local employees. It also has 1,500 work permits approved for foreign workers who are provided housing, meals and transportation.
• Lion Tech and Shamrock Technology in Taiwan design keyboards and monitors, respectively.
• LIKOM PCB is a technology transfer agreement with Mommers Print Service of Holland.
• Lion Plastic Industries receives technical assistance and continuous upgrading from Ishihara Plastic and Sannoh Ginken from Japan.

Key Results

The motherboard design is from Lion Computer Technology (USA), multimedia products and CD ROM designs are from Lion Optics Corporation (USA), and power supply designs are from 3Y Power Technologies (USA).

Conclusions

LIKOM's facility is highly automated. Many of the manufacturing technologies contained in LIKOM were technology transfers from other companies.