{"id":70509,"date":"2026-08-11T15:39:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T15:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/70509\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T15:39:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T15:39:18","slug":"malaysias-semiconductor-value-chain-climb-siemens-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/70509\/","title":{"rendered":"Malaysia’s semiconductor value chain climb: Siemens’ view"},"content":{"rendered":"

Malaysia is pushing up the semiconductor value chain from back-end assembly into chip design, and Siemens sees it as Southeast Asia\u2019s frontrunner, but still a step behind India and China.Two senior Siemens executives sketched where the region actually sits, and why export controls have split the industry into two parallel supply chains rather than one.<\/p>\n

Malaysia\u2019s retreat up the semiconductor value chain is the country\u2019s defining industrial bet, and the executives selling the software that underpins chip design have a clear-eyed, and not entirely flattering, view of how far it has come. Siemens counts Malaysia as one of Southeast Asia\u2019s frontrunners. It also places the country well behind the parts of Asia that have already made the leap it is attempting.<\/p>\n

Speaking at Realize LIVE Asia-Pacific in Bengaluru, Bas Kuper, senior vice president and managing director for Asia Pacific at Siemens Digital Industries Software, put Malaysia\u2019s position plainly. The country is, in his words, \u201crecognised as number two in the world for semiconductor manufacturing\u201d, a status built almost entirely on the back end. For more than fifty years<\/a> Malaysia has specialised in assembly and test, the final, lower-value stages of making a chip. The ambition now is to move upstream into design.<\/p>\n

What the value chain looks like from a vendor\u2019s seat\"BasBas Kuper, senior vice president and managing director for Asia Pacific at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Credit: LinkedIn<\/p>\n

Kuper\u2019s map of Asia is a useful corrective to the optimism that surrounds Malaysia\u2019s push. China, he noted, \u201cmoved to design already a long time ago\u201d and is far ahead. Japan is a mature market anchored by large automotive, electronics and semiconductor firms. India has become a design powerhouse, not in manufacturing, but in the engineering work that sits above it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the larger enterprises, they have design technical centres here in India,\u201d Kuper said, pointing to the audience at the event. \u201cThe majority of their simulation people, design people, are actually in India doing the work for the globe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Against that backdrop, Southeast Asia is still mostly a manufacturing story. \u201cEventually they will move up the supply chain as well,\u201d Kuper said of the region, before singling Malaysia out as one of the frontrunners doing so, ahead of Vietnam and Thailand, which remain weighted toward manufacturing. It is encouragement, but of a measured kind: Malaysia leads a pack that is itself behind.<\/p>\n

The underlying figures bear out both the strength and the distance. Malaysia is the world\u2019s sixth-largest exporter of semiconductors and handles roughly 13% of global chip testing and packaging, with 2024 semiconductor exports of about US$130 billion. Its National Semiconductor Strategy, launched at SEMICON SEA 2024 and backed by RM25 billion (US$5.3 billion), sets out a three-phase climb: shore up the back-end strength first, move into integrated circuit design and advanced packaging next, and reach front-end wafer fabrication last.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The country aims to double its roughly 7% share of the global market by the end of the decade.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Selling into the transition<\/p>\n

For Siemens, Malaysia\u2019s ambition<\/a> is also a commercial opening, and the company is approaching it from a position it has quietly held for years. Its Camstar manufacturing execution software, the shop-floor systems that run and track production, has been installed in Southeast Asian fabs for a long time, giving Siemens a foothold on the manufacturing side before design ever entered the conversation.<\/p>\n

That base is what Kuper says Siemens is now building on as chip companies look to move up. The company has developed what it calls semiconductor lifecycle management, a template built on its Teamcenter platform to support the product lifecycle side of semiconductor firms, the systems that track a chip from design through production.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re building on these relationships that we have on the EDA side, on the manufacturing side, now moving into design and lifecycle management,\u201d Kuper said, citing wins with Samsung\u2019s semiconductor arm and Japan\u2019s Rapidus.<\/p>\n

The bottleneck to adoption, in his account, is not the one the region tends to name. Talent is abundant, \u201cwe sort of have a luxury problem here,\u201d he said of Asia\u2019s deep pool of engineers. The harder constraint is organisational. \u201cIt\u2019s the change management or the organisational transformation that the companies have to go through,\u201d Kuper said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a technology question. It is more on how do I get my people to think differently?\u201d He noted that one customer had a strike the week before over a plan to pilot humanoid robots, a reminder that the friction in moving up the value chain is often human rather than technical.<\/p>\n

Two supply chains, not one\"AnkurAnkur Gupta, executive vice president of EDA IC software at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Credit: LinkedIn<\/p>\n

If Malaysia\u2019s climb is the regional story, the global backdrop is the fracturing of the semiconductor industry along geopolitical lines, and here Ankur Gupta, executive vice president of EDA IC software at Siemens, offered the sharper read. Asked whether last year\u2019s brief US export restrictions on chip design tools for China had changed how customers in the region think about sourcing, Gupta described a market settling into two parallel structures rather than fragmenting into many.<\/p>\n

\u201cChina is definitely building its own completely domestically owned full stack,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not just EDA tools. They\u2019re looking at manufacturing, everything.\u201d The motive, as he framed it, is resilience: China is constructing a self-contained ecosystem so it cannot be cut off. The rest of Asia is not splintering in response. \u201cYou very clearly see Japan, US, these are the allied nations. You see Europe, Japan, US, Taiwan, Korea, all working together,\u201d Gupta said. \u201cIndia is a huge design centre. It\u2019s not at all there in manufacturing, but India has a desire to get into OSAT.\u201d His conclusion was blunt: \u201cChina has a supply chain, and the rest of the allied nations have a second supply chain.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a calmer reading than the decoupling anxiety that colours much of the coverage, and a consequential one for Malaysia. A country that has staked its upgrade on being a neutral, non-aligned node in the global supply chain is, on Gupta\u2019s account, operating in a world that is consolidating into two blocs rather than dispersing risk across many. Where Malaysia lands in that structure, and how much design work the allied bloc routes through it rather than through an already-dominant India, is the question its strategy has yet to answer.<\/p>\n

For now, Siemens\u2019 executives offer Malaysia a qualified endorsement: a genuine frontrunner in Southeast Asia, moving in the right direction, on a longer road than the ambition sometimes admits, and into an industry that has quietly sorted itself into two.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo<\/a> taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx<\/a> and is co-located with other leading technology events, click here<\/a> for more information.<\/p>\n

Tech Wire Asia is powered by TechForge Media<\/a>. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Malaysia is pushing up the semiconductor value chain from back-end assembly into chip design, and Siemens sees it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70510,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21002],"tags":[52435,52436,47708,52437,52438,52439,52440,52441,6487,47705,52442],"class_list":["post-70509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-siemens","tag-ankur-gupta","tag-bas-kuper","tag-chip-design","tag-emiconductor-supply-chain","tag-malaysia-semiconductors","tag-national-semiconductor-strategy","tag-osat","tag-semiconductor-value-chain","tag-siemens","tag-siemens-eda","tag-southeast-asia-semiconductors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}