The operating questions my customers and workers ask

Most of Kelvorne's growth since 2019 has come from moving work between countries: a greenfield plant in Bac Ninh, 212 part numbers out of Suzhou, and frames from Singapore to Johor. In our industry a transfer is governed by the customer. Semiconductor-equipment makers generally require a supplier to notify them and obtain approval before changing a site, a process or a sub-supplier, and some expect the transferred process to be copied exactly before anyone improves it. I plan transfers around that discipline: a frozen process sheet for each part family, first-article inspection at the receiving site, a period of dual running and the customer's written approval before the old line stops. My own addition is the exit criterion. I do not call a transfer complete until each shift at the receiving plant has held yield for eight consecutive weeks without visiting staff, and the local team has taken at least one engineering change through the customer's approval process unaided.

About 1,700 of the 4,400 people in our Penang and Johor plants are migrant workers, mostly from Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar. I treat their recruitment as a supply chain I am accountable for, with Malaysian agencies as first-tier suppliers and their partners in each home country as the tier beneath. Since late 2021 Kelvorne has paid every cost of recruitment, from medical checks and permits to airfares, and we repaid RM 15.8 million to 1,412 workers who had paid fees before that rule was enforced. Workers keep their own passports, with personal lockers in every dormitory. Our dormitories are inspected against the statutory housing standards that Malaysia extended beyond plantations and mining, and against our customers' codes, which are stricter on space and privacy. Recruitment cost, fee findings, overtime hours and grievances raised in workers' own languages sit in every monthly operating review beside yield and delivery.

Our customers' tools depend on parts that must hold a vacuum, carry ultra-pure gases and survive plasma, so our quality risk sits in special processes: orbital welding of electropolished stainless tubing, machining and anodising of large aluminium chamber bodies, helium leak testing and final assembly in ISO-classified cleanrooms. I manage these through first-pass yield by process and by shift, rather than plant averages that can hide a weak night. After the 2015 chamber-lid escape in Penang we brought helium leak testing in-house for every vacuum part we ship, and we hold our sub-suppliers of plate and castings to the same evidence. Group cost of poor quality fell from 2.9 per cent of revenue in 2021 to 1.6 per cent in 2025. The improvements belong to quality engineers and welders. My part is to keep the measures honest and to protect the investment when the semiconductor cycle turns down.

A contract manufacturer is audited constantly. In 2024 Kelvorne hosted 41 customer audits across five plants, covering quality systems, information security, export control, labour practice and environment, on top of certification audits for our quality-management and medical-device standards. Each customer brings its own checklist and its own route through the plant. Having spent four years as a customer's auditor, I know how much a visit can miss, so I have shifted our effort from preparing visits to keeping records that would satisfy an unannounced one: shift-level yield, deviation and corrective-action logs, welder qualifications, working hours and dormitory occupancy. Since 2025 three of our largest customers have accepted one shared annual audit of labour and environmental practice by an independent firm, with read-only access to the underlying records between visits. It replaced eleven separate visits in its first year, and the findings that remained were more specific.

Energy and labour are the two costs that have moved most in our plants since 2021, and I manage them together. When our Singapore electricity contract was renewed in late 2022, the unit price rose by about 60 per cent, and the Woodlands cleanroom, which runs its air handling around the clock, felt it first. We cut its consumption by 14 per cent through airflow setback in idle bays, a compressed-air leak programme and moving heat treatment to off-peak hours, and we installed 4.2 megawatts of rooftop solar at Batu Kawan. Automation, in my view, follows a different logic from the one usually put to boards. In Johor I justified robotic bending and welding cells not on labour savings, which rarely pay back in a high-mix plant, but on exposure: each cell reduces the recruitment journeys we depend on when levies rise or approvals for new migrant workers are frozen. Since 2022, 180 positions have gone unfilled as people left, and nobody was dismissed.