From the President’s Desk: NSTAR Looks Ahead
February 21, 2017
By Darrell McDaniel
As we move further into Q1 of 2017 in the semiconductor industry, the NSTAR Global Services team is looking forward to another year of growth and innovation. With those two keywords in mind, we are opening our lines of communication with a new platform, the NSTAR blog. Our goal is to give visitors a look at our company from the inside out. We encourage you to check back for frequent updates from our team offering relevant content and perspectives from the voices within our operations.
2016 was by all accounts a very strong year for our company, bringing on more candidates than any other year in our 17-year history! We also continued to expand into new areas of vertical growth within our existing client base as well as augmenting our customer roster. I sincerely want to thank all of you for your business and support over the past year.
We aren’t resting on our laurels, however. Given the high expectations for growth in China, we are investing in the development of a local service group there. Working directly with our parent company, M+W Group, we started the “M+W Services Group” to provide local engineers and technicians to our OEM customers in China.
Stateside, the semiconductor industry is very mature, and other than a few instances, we don’t foresee many new high volume manufacturing facilities coming online in 2017. However, we do anticipate that integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) will continue to do system upgrades to keep pace with technology growth. NSTAR is well-positioned to assist in the upgrade process using our asset relocation service teams. These are composed of skilled engineers and technicians whose sole job is to execute the decommissioning/commissioning of new and legacy systems.
The aforementioned growth in China will also create demand for our engineers and technicians to move from project to project overseas, while the entire semiconductor industry deals with inevitable factors such as an aging workforce and a resistance to travel. A core component of our 2017 plans is to strengthen our talent pool, as it is critical to our growth. To achieve this, we are looking to expand a number of key partnerships. One partnership that we are very proud of is to work with the military to hire soldiers who are completing their service as well as veterans. We are also building stronger relationships with colleges, including the development of a facility to train new talent in high tech manufacturing basics to better equip recent graduates to hit the ground running once on the fab floor.
According to the American Staffing Association, the current staffing industry is a $147 billion business with year-over-year growth. NSTAR’s strategy for 2017 is to find ways to increase our market share by identifying new customers in the semiconductor market and expanding to similar industries such as automation, automotive and other high tech manufacturing environments to grow our staff augmentation business.
We are committed to being more than ‘another staffing agency,’ however. 2017 will see us truly cement our role as an operation and maintenance services company—one that takes ownership of a customer’s process and/or facilities, chemical distribution, system maintenance, etc. This is a key differentiator in high tech markets and critical to allow us to serve as a true service partner to our customers and add value and flexibility to their operations.
Personally, I am very optimistic about NSTAR’s future. As with the tech industry at large, we have weathered our industry’s ups and downs over the last 17 years, and NSTAR is well-positioned to grow through diversification and increased collaboration with the M+W Group.
We, as a company, thank you for taking the time to visit our new blog. Know that we will continue to look at ways we can take a leadership position as we grow and push for innovative paths forward in the high tech sector.
