Phil Carmichael: IPC Asia Continues Solid Growth

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Phil Carmichael, IPC president of Asia Pacific, talks with Barry Matties at the HKPCA show during the first week of December 2019 about the continued growth and increased engagement by Asian member companies with IPC, with over 320 members in standards committees now working on the development of the next-generation standards.

Barry Matties: Can you give a brief update on the status of IPC and the accomplishments in Asia over the last year?

Phil Carmichael: Financially, IPC has had a good year, and we continue to grow our membership. We’ve had a very strong year in Southeast Asia and Japan. China continues to grow, even though the economy has been a little bit slower this year than in previous years. But overall, we’re growing, and we’ve had a good year. I started almost eight years ago. And when I joined at the beginning of 2013, we had around 300 members; we’re going to end the year at about 1,500.

Matties: That’s substantial growth.

Carmichael: And revenue, a sign of industry engagement, has grown even faster than that.

Matties: What was the impetus behind your growth?

Carmichael: We developed an entire management infrastructure in the AP region. We brought in a finance team and strengthened the sales organization. One of the critical issues was that we were able to make decisions to support a member customer in China on the same day without having to go somewhere else to get information. That is one of the big reasons that we’ve been able to sustain growth. It’s tough to have seven years in a row where you’re growing, and that’s what we’ve had. Also, the engagement that we have with our member customers in China has been huge. We’re a standards organization, so that’s the core of our business; it all starts with the standards. IPC developed standards with committees from the industry. Our interest is to have strong member companies to participate in standards committees globally. In 2015, we had no members in China on standards development committees. We had about 200 people in China working only on translations.

To read this entire interview, which appeared in the January 2020 issue of SMT007 Magazine, click here.

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