WKK's Hamed El-Abd on the Current State of China

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

El-Abd: It's a huge issue.

Matties: That’s a lot of added expense to the end consumer. It's truly interesting to see these models. I think we're in an interesting time and a transitional period. There is a generational shift that's happening in China where people growing up don't want factory jobs. They want different kinds of jobs. There's job hopping, there's wage pressures, and there's the social aspect.

El-Abd: As crazy as it is, it's hard to find good workers in China. Isn't that nuts when you have a billion and a half people and you can't find good workers?

Matties: They're educated too. They're coming out of university with multiple degrees.

El-Abd: But they can't find the decent jobs today. I mean, you come out of the university, and you're working in a hotel. They don't really want that but that's what they've got. Then they go home. That's something that never used to happen. You would go to where the job is. Now you don't have to. You go home and you can stay and have a reasonably good income in your hometown and close to your family.

Matties: It's more desirable. It'll be interesting to see the long-term effects on the desire for education because they don't have to be holding two degrees to go work at that hotel, per se.

El-Abd: Keep in mind how many Chinese are being educated overseas or in the United States for that matter, at the major universities, too.

Matties: The goal for the United States is to keep them in the United States once they obtain that education.

El-Abd: A lot of them are staying, but China wants them back. They’re saying, we'll make sure we get you back. Here's a little perk to get you to come back and they're being offered very good jobs to come back.

Matties: I was at the printed electronics show in San Jose recently and there was an Israeli company with a box, roughly 3 ft. x 4 ft., which was outputting completed prototype boards. They're using what he was calling FR-4 silver ink, no drilling, everything is just placed where you need it. To me, it felt like what I was looking at was the birth of the future. When you look at all the direct imaging and all these technologies, it seems like there's a point in time where it all merges together.

El-Abd: I think that the future is yet to be written in our industry, but the future is moving very rapidly to all kinds of different new boards, and maybe in the future we won't even have boards. Maybe everything goes on a couple components, I don't know. A lot of things are going to change but it's still a ways away. But if you go back 30 years, where were we?

Matties: That's the interesting thing; 30 years ago the boards looked pretty much the same as they do today. What's changed in 30 years is the way we produce them, but the boards look the same. Now, what we're seeing is a shift in the way the boards actually look.

El-Abd: Like 3D printing. So much stuff is going to be done by 3D printing. You'll be 3D printing a house. The Chinese 3D printed a five story building here. It was completely 3D printed.

Matties: That must have been a big printer.

El-Abd: A fully functional five story building and it was built by the company that makes the 3D printer, which was this humongous system and they were showing everybody they could do this. And they did. Those are game changers. You could go and print the building or print the house or whatever very quickly, including the electrical works, the plumbing and everything else.

Matties: Hamed, it's been great to catch up with you.

El-Abd: Thank you very much.

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