CHAPTER 8 - Boom & Bust in the Electronics Industry

Summary

“I also built the one millionth iMac that was presented to CEO Steve Jobs.”

— Goh Chye Lee, MPE Pioneer

THE iPOD, iPHONE AND iPAD have endeared a new generation to Apple, one of the largest technology firm in the world with an annual revenue of over $84 billion in 2010. In its 35-year history, Apple has many milestones and MPE pioneer Goh Chye Lee was involved on two occasions. He shared, “I was the engineer who transferred the manufacturing of the original Macintosh –– a nine-inch monochrome all-in-one computer –– from the United States to Singapore. I also built the one millionth iMac that was presented to CEO Steve Jobs.”

Chye Lee is a case-in-point on the quality of NTI pioneers. Singapore was mired in recession in 1985 and thousands were vying for a job with Apple Computer (as the company was known then). He got an interview because he used an Apple II compatible computer and a dot-matrix printer to print his resume. He beat 103 applicants to land the manufacturing engineer job, the first fresh graduate that Apple hired. Later, other NTI pioneers such as Yew Wee Chong and Charles Yap Kiat Hoong joined him. Charles Yap spent 18 years with Apple being extensively involved with the iMac, iBook and MacBook. In recent years, Charles has been the technical product manager for Apple peripherals such as keyboard, mouse, and the popular iPad.

These pioneers are among hundreds of NTI pioneers that contributed to Singapore's electronics industry, a key economic engine over four decades. There are three pillars to this industry –– consumer electronics, semiconductors and disk drives. Apple is one of several firms driving the consumer electronics industry in Singapore. Others included Hewlett Packard (HP), Dell, Philips, Matsushita, Creative Technology and Motorola. Together they churned out microphones, loudspeakers, amplifiers, personal computers (PCs), colour TV sets, radios and videocassette recorders. The electronics industry started in the late 1960s when foreign companies set up assembly plants for products such as transistors and low-end consumer electronics. Even in the early days, the electronics industry provided jobs for one-third of the workforce.

By the mid-1990s, electronics was contributing over half the economy's manufacturing output. By 2003, the electronics industry accounted for 43 per cent of domestic exports.