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Stocks (from 8)
Dr. Kim, now executive chairman of the
board, came to the U.S. in 1955 to study
economics at the University of Pennsylva-
nia.
He taught at nearby Villanova University
for six years before founding Amkor as the
American sales agent for his father’s then-
struggling Anam Industrial.
Amkor now includes two China-based plants. (Amkor)
Kim’s other ventures
include Electronics Bou- semiconductor makers, who performed
tique in Pennsylvania their own assembly outside their U.S.
with his wife Agnes, homeland.
started in 1977. The
couple sold the company Captive assembly
to GameStop for $1.4 At the time, AMD, Fairchild Semiconduc-
billion in 2005. He has tor, Honeywell, Intel, Motorola, and sev-
subsequenty appeared eral others did assembly and packaging
on Forbes’ annual billion- for their own products in company-owned
James Kim facilities in Hong Kong, Korea, the Philip-
aires’ list.
pines and Thailand.
Low-profile CEO
Dr. Kim, while still living in Pennsylvania, The first contract assembler, in fact, had
served as Amkor’s CEO/chairman from been Micro Electronics Ltd, which estab-
Sepember 1977 through October 2009. lished the first contract packaging plant in
Hong Kong in 1962.
In those postions, he kept a very low pro-
file and was rarely — if ever — seen at any Outside vendors
semiconductor industry events. The active The chip makers did not yet feel fully fully
operation of Amkor was left to his execu- comfortable with jobbing their advanced
tive cadre. wafers to an outside vendor.
Kim’s savvy business acumen is obvious: This was to change slowly over the de-
Amkor, when it began, was one of the first cades and Amkor was the main pioneer in
independent chip assembly and packaging the field and the beneficiary of a mindset
companies during the Stone Age of chip that later embraced the OSATs.
assembly.
Through the tumult of the early years,
Almost every Amkor independent competi- Amkor sustained and evolved from its
tor — and they were legion — including Anam Industrial beginnings into a world-
forgotten names Amertron, ASAT, Dynet- wide provider.
ics, IMI and Stanford Microsystems disap-
peared long ago. By 2000, Amkor had bested its indepen-
dent OSAT competitors in revenue and was
Amkor was also competing with the large next page
