VIEWPOINT 2022: Rosie Medina, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, QP Technologies

Rosie Medina, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, QP Technologies

Once again, 2021 proved to be a challenging year. We are fortunate to have weathered the pandemic in terms of employee health; we experienced a low number of cases of COVID-19 within our workforce, none serious. Our corporate health has remained robust thanks to the efforts of our entire team. Having been designated an essential business, we not only remained open, but we actually grew the business by nearly 15% over the past year. To help meet customer requirements, we identified and hired a number of talented individuals in sales, marketing, engineering, and customer service.

Some employees continue to work from home, and with the successful transition to this work-from-home model, we will likely extend this practice indefinitely for select positions. While we resumed attending conferences in person this year, we anticipate the hybrid (in-person/virtual) event model continuing. This flexibility allows companies and individuals to allocate travel budgets more effectively, especially across continents, and broadens the pool of speakers, making for excellent content.

In general, we have a stable supply chain in place, but like most in the industry, we are experiencing some shortages and extended lead times, particularly for materials. Delivery times for lead frames have tripled, while substrate lead times have greatly increased, from 2-4 weeks to as long as 16-20 weeks. We are also having to wait longer for delivery of consumables like grinding wheels for our wafer backgrinders and bonding tools for wirebond and flip chip. We’re proactively working to stay on top of our substrate and material inventory, placing orders sooner to make sure we get into the queue earlier and increasing safety stocks at our facility.

As more manufacturing comes back onshore, U.S. customers will benefit in numerous ways, including faster time to market, greater IP protection, shortened supply chain with fewer participants, and carrying less inventory, to name a few. In light of this reshoring trend, we've added new wirebonders and other equipment and added new personnel positions to ensure we stay ahead of demand. And to ensure our customers can stay ahead of demand, we work closely with them on custom substrate development to ensure they have materials ready when their wafers arrive.

As 2022 starts out with much uncertainty due to the new omicron variant, we are optimistic that the semiconductor industry and QP Technologies will continue along the strong growth path seen in 2021.

Rosie Medina, Vice President, Sales and Marketing

http://www.qptechnologies.com

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