ESG Hound: A pseudonym for Eric Roesch, a self-described “environmental policy expert” and a former project manager at a series of chemical companies, who has 5,686 Twitter followers.
He challenges our Malaysian manufacturing site choice, “Malaysia is a legal black box to outsiders, so it’s not shocking that fraudsters [referring to Enovix and T.J. Rodgers] have shown an affinity for using the country for their good old-fashioned stock promotes.”
In reality, Malaysia is probably the second-best low-cost manufacturing country in the world after China. With all the tariff problems China currently has, Malaysia became our No. 1 choice. Malaysia’s Penang Island is the epicenter of silicon assembly and test (read “competent manufacturing”). When I was the chairman of SunPower, we built our third solar-cell autoline plant in Malaysia, and it outperformed our first two Philippines plants. Enovix’s new COO, Ajay Marathe, put a semiconductor assembly and test plant in Malaysia when he was the VP of Operations at AMD, and another big plant there when he was the COO of Lumileds. The chairman of the YBS group (a public company with 1,000 employees) worked for Ajay at both AMD and Lumileds. That’s why he chose YBS to hire and manage the local workforce in our new Penang plant that we have now occupied with 32 experienced employees hired using YBS’s knowledge of local talent.