Richard Short has been with the company for 22 years, rising through the ranks from Applications Engineer to head of Customer Service, to International Sales Manager, to his current position. He has degrees in science laboratory technology, business administration, plus an MBA.
At Indium, you have developed an interesting set of innovative marcom strategies.
One characteristic of Indium Corporation is that every person matters. We don’t have a lot of rules as to what you can or can’t do. That’s why you see so many exciting presentations. Because people are allowed to implement their ideas – their passions.
A good example is your corporate blog on the Internet.
Blogging as a marcom strategy is just another way of getting the word out. It allows for great transparency; it lets you to post your ideas every day, every minute*. A magazine communication usually is about two hundred words. A blog can be just 20 words. And it allows readers to comment almost in real time.
And it lets you shape the discourse about pertinent issues.
True, but you can also help the community shape it. Our Dr. Lasky** blog seeks comments to learn about peoples‘ opinions, for instance on lead-free and RoHS. It’s an open forum, communal and collegial. We get a lot more private e-mails in return than you will find on the blog. It’s pretty effective.
How large does indium as a commodity figure in your portfolio?
Indium Corp. is a diverse company, having a fairly even reliance on various markets. We sell a full range of assembly materials, from solder fabrications to solder pastes to fluxes, underfills, polymers, thermal interface materials, and more. There is no one product that is “the largest.” One interesting product family is indium and its compounds. They are used in a variety of goods, foremost LCD displays. That’s a strongly growing market.
Indium as a commodity leads us right into China.
We have a refinery in China, which gives us a strong position in Asia and in the U.S. As a vertically integrated company we have interests in mining, refining and fabrication.
Approaching the lead-free zone …
Indium is “the lead-free company”. Our very first alloy was lead-free – 72 years ago. Today our portfolio contains many effective lead-free materials. That has given us much insight long before they became mandatory. A lot of companies came late to the game and now play catch-up. For us, it was a quite comfortable transition.
Back to your corporate engagement in China …
We have plants in Suzhou and Liuzhou. Liuzhou is a refinery. Suzhou is a solder-paste fabrication facility serving the Chinese market. It’s also our China headquarters. It has been operational since 2004.
How has this come along since then?
It is a tremendous success. We are very pleased with the growth and are making plans for further expansion.
Where about?
We are weighing several opportunities. There is large demand for materials in the South of China – as well as in the North. And there are exciting opportunities elsewhere in the world, as well.
Would you like to share a few of your insights into doing business in China?
The dynamics of the Chinese markets are thrilling. There is such a variety of products being built and the competition is very powerful – between the locals as well as global suppliers.
How about controlling your IP?
Indium believes the same good strategies should be used everywhere. That’s not unique to China. It’s unique to IP management at any place, any time. You plug into the legal facts and the cultural nuances and make smart decisions. We do that wherever we go.
Nothing special to China in this regard …
It’s all manageable. The local nuances have to be obeyed, of course. It’s a risk-and-reward scenario. For us, in China, the reward is greater than the risk.
But there are intercultural issues to watch.
As a novice, to drop your own values into another culture is naïve and mistaken. We want to be as respectful as possible. We are continually learning. It’s the cultural presumptions that can create confusion. The mechanics of language are much easier to overcome.
Give us an example, if you will.
In our main locations: the U.S., UK, Singapore, and China, there are four different cultural concepts of leadership. Any project leader must be sensitive to the fact that members of their team may have quite different expectations for management style.
Your presentation at Semicon West back in July came under the heading “reliability”.
Reliability is critical. We focus on our customers‘ finished goods performance. We want our customers to achieve optimized product reliability.
In regard to lead-free?
In everything they do. We listen to our customers’ concerns and we align ourselves with their needs. We constantly network with industry experts. We have clear development goals. We don’t just put our products into a vending machine – we support them. We have the largest group of SMTA-certified process engineers in the industry. More than all of our competition combined.
Some innovative product you want to mention?
Indium’s NF260 No-Flow Underfill has earned awards on three continents. It is best in class. We have analytical data showing that, with NF260, finished goods reliability increases by one order of magnitude compared to competitive underfills, and increases two orders of magnitude compared to using no underfill at all. That’s reliability!
Interview: Werner Schulz, U.S. Correspondent
* Rick Short’s B2B Marcom Blog (www.indium.com/rickshort)
** Dr. Lasky’s Blog (www.indium.com/drlasky)
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