Technical Sales Engineer Anthony Godwin spent three weeks travelling through Japan, China, Taiwan and Singapore. Here's what the trip was really about and what it uncovered.
Most of the customers IES Semiconductor Parts works with across Asia, we've never actually sat across a table from. Enquiries come in, parts get sourced or repaired, and everything gets handled from Bristol, UK. It works, but it also means a lot of relationships exist only on paper, a name on an order, a company on an invoice.
This trip was about closing that gap. Rather than send someone solely from the commercial side, we sent Anthony Godwin, A technical sales engineer, on a three-week route through Japan, China, Taiwan and Singapore, sitting down with the customers, brokers and fabs who keep decades-old semiconductor tools running long after the equipment manufacturers have stopped supporting them.
The thinking was simple: someone with an engineering background asks different questions than a salesperson does. He can look at what a customer is actually running, understand the specific problems they're hitting, and spot where our repair and testing capability genuinely solves something for them, rather than just pitching a generic service. For Anthony specifically, five years into his time with us, it was also a chance to see how the same equipment he works on in the workshop gets used on the other side of the world, and to build a first-hand picture of an industry that, until now, he'd mostly understood through the parts that come across his bench.
First stop was Tokyo, followed by Osaka and Fukuoka. Each leg was a chance to catch up with existing partners face to face, get a read on what equipment they're currently running, and hear directly what they're likely to need support with next. A bullet train journey between cities gave a small taste of just how tightly Japan's infrastructure runs, a fitting backdrop for conversations about precision equipment.
Japan's relationship with the semiconductor industry runs deep. It still accounts for roughly a tenth of global chip sales, but its real influence sits further up the supply chain: Japanese firms dominate the materials and equipment side of the business, supplying the majority of the world's silicon wafers, photoresists, and other critical inputs that every fab, regardless of country, ultimately depends on. It's an industry built on precision and longevity, which made for some of the most technically detailed conversations of the whole trip.
That longevity cuts both ways, though. Japanese fabs are known for keeping equipment in service for a long time, which means a steady stream of tools reaching the point where the original manufacturer has stopped offering support. That's precisely the gap IES Semiconductor Parts is built to fill, sourcing, repairing and properly testing parts for equipment the OEM has long since moved on from, so customers can keep tools running rather than face a costly and disruptive replacement.
From Japan, the route continued into China for meetings in Beijing and Shanghai. Outside the meeting rooms, there was a customer lunch and a visit to the Great Wall. A good reminder that these trips are as much about building trust over a shared meal as they are about the technical conversations themselves.
China is, by scale, the biggest semiconductor market on earth, responsible for over half of global chip consumption. What's changed in recent years is the sheer number of fabs now operating domestically, many of them focused on mature, well-established process nodes rather than the cutting edge. That's a deliberate strategy, and it means an enormous and growing installed base of equipment across the country, much of it running for years rather than being replaced on a short cycle.
That scale is exactly where a partner like IES Semiconductor Parts becomes useful. As fabs across China lean on mature equipment for longer, the market for OEM-discontinued parts only grows, and our ability to repair and fully test those parts, rather than simply source a replacement and hope for the best, is something we heard genuine interest in throughout every meeting on this leg of the trip.
Taiwan meant a tighter schedule again, with customer visits across Taipei and Hsinchu. Hospitality here left an impression. One customer took Anthony for dumplings, another for hotpot, and there was even time between meetings to take the lift up Taipei 101, currently the tallest building in the country.
That lift, incidentally, is a small engineering story in itself: it covers the 89 floors to the observation deck in under 40 seconds, and the building carries a 660-tonne steel pendulum near the top to keep it steady in typhoons and earthquakes. Not something you see every day, and a nice parallel to the kind of engineering problem-solving that fills the rest of Anthony's working life.
It's hard to overstate how central Taiwan is to this industry. A single company, TSMC, headquartered in Hsinchu, now accounts for roughly 70% of the entire global foundry market, meaning the majority of the world's advanced chips pass through Taiwan at some stage. That concentration draws an enormous, tightly packed ecosystem of suppliers, contractors and equipment specialists into a relatively small area, which made Hsinchu in particular a dense and valuable few days of meetings.
With an industry this concentrated, equipment gets pushed hard and fabs are constantly weighing the cost of upgrading against keeping existing tools running efficiently. When a manufacturer discontinues support for older equipment still doing useful work, that's where IES Semiconductor Parts steps in. Supplying and properly testing the parts needed to keep it going, rather than forcing a premature and expensive replacement decision.
The trip closed in Singapore, where meetings began almost as soon as the plane landed. Despite the pace, there was time to take in Marina Bay Sands from a distance, its rooftop SkyPark, longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall, is hard to miss on the skyline.
Singapore is a small country with an outsized footprint in this industry. It accounts for roughly 10% of global semiconductor output and around 20% of semiconductor manufacturing equipment worldwide, and ranks as the sixth largest semiconductor exporter globally. Names like Applied Materials, KLA, ASM and ASMPT all maintain a serious presence there, which meant plenty of relevant, technical conversation for an engineer to get stuck into.
It also gave a glimpse of a food culture built from Chinese, Malay, Indian and Peranakan traditions, often sitting side by side on the same hawker centre menu. Hainanese chicken rice, chilli crab, laksa and roti prata all showing up within a few stalls of each other.
More importantly for the business, Singapore's fabs typically run a blend of the newest tools alongside older, well-worn equipment. Exactly the mix where a partner able to source, repair and properly test legacy parts has something genuinely useful to offer. It's a market we'll be paying close attention to as these relationships develop.
One thing became clear fast: wherever Anthony went, customers wanted to talk about the same thing. How we actually test parts before they go back out the door.
It's a fair question, because most repair providers stop at the basics: switch the part on, confirm it outputs the correct voltage, ship it back. IES Semiconductor Parts built something different. A working control system inside our own workshop, configured to match the actual tool a part would return to. That lets us put a repaired part through real diagnostics, benchmark its performance against a known-good unit, and confirm it communicates properly with the rest of the system it's designed for, rather than simply confirming it powers up.
For a customer relying on a tool the original manufacturer stopped supporting years ago, that level of assurance changes the calculation entirely. It's the difference between hoping a part works once it's reinstalled and knowing it does before it ever leaves our workshop. Hearing that land the same way in Tokyo, Beijing, Taipei and Singapore says something about how universal that problem is across the industry.
Beyond the conversations themselves, spending time inside customer facilities across four countries gave Anthony a much sharper sense of how this industry actually operates region by region. What equipment is running where, where the gaps in support tend to show up, and where IES Semiconductor Parts could genuinely do more. That's arguably the most valuable outcome of the whole trip: not just stronger relationships, but a clearer map of where the opportunities sit.
It was also, by any measure, a rare opportunity. Three weeks, four countries, and a first-hand look at an industry Anthony has spent five years supporting from a workshop in the UK. We're grateful to every customer and partner who made time to meet with him, and we're looking forward to seeing where these relationships lead next.
Running equipment that could use a reliable source of semiconductor parts, or curious how our testing process actually works? Get in touch with our team — we're happy to talk through your setup.