How we have fallen

It's so heartbreaking for our generation to see how we have fallen through the years.

- BOO CHANCO

Our country was not at the near bottom of ASEAN. Indeed, we were once upon a time, ahead of many of our neighboring tigers. I have seen this myself when I visited the original ASEAN countries back in 1969 as part of a goodwill delegation of the UP Student Council.

It isn't just me. I received an email from a reader reacting to my column last Wednesday.

Here is what Raul Esguerra shared: "Hi Boo, "I have been in the semicon industry since the mid-70s. The Philippines is decades ahead of Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia at that time, even more advanced than Taiwan. Stanford Micro-systems and Dynetics were even bigger than TSMC then.

"Intel, Raytheon, Motorola, AMD, AMI, ZILOG, Fairchild, Texas Instruments, had their chip assembly here first, ahead of all ASEAN countries in the 70s.

"I set up the first gold wire manufacturing facility in Mactan, Cebu in 1995, primarily to support the local semiconductor assemblies with their gold wire requirements. The direction then was to set up local manufacturing to support the semiconductor manufacturing.

"I also saw the decline. Intel even expanded their Penang facility several times, leaving the Philippine plant stagnant, then moved to Gateway in Cavite, but ultimately closed it in favor of Vietnam.

"Yes, we were way ahead even of South Korea then, when Koreans were coming in the 60s to observe our TV manufacturing."

Then I found this two-year-old posting on Reddit: "What happened to the tech manufacturing prowess of the Philippines?