Guenter Krasser, Infineon Technologies: “A high level of R&D is possible in Romania, but growth depends on the availability of talents”

“Infineon is a top 10 semiconductor company worldwide. It’s the number one semiconductor company in Europe and the biggest provider of chips for the automotive market.

In Romania we are developing certain categories of chips within this big portfolio we are having. We are also number one for automotive microcontrollers.

We have managed to fund our growth in Romania mainly from our own funds. We have found a favourable environment here in Romania, and we were willing to grow talents here in the country. We put effort, year after year, on attracting talents and growing talents, to increase their interest for this area of developing semiconductor chips and not to be fully attracted only by software,” Guenter Krasser, Vice president and Managing Director, Infineon Technologies Romania said at Automotive R&D Power Breakfast organized by Automotive Today.

We are the biggest semiconductor company in Romania, and we can bring a chip from the idea through a complete development lifecycle until we are able to move it into high volume production in one of our factories worldwide.

Our automotive business is still growing, and we were able to grow our footprint here in Bucharest in the last year. We opened our first R&D center in Iasi, and we will also open our R&D office in Brasov. A lot is possible here in Romania. Our teams are competence centers for a couple of product categories which you find worldwide in nearly every OEM car.

A high level of R&D is possible in Romania, but I also think we are approaching an inflexion point, because growth depends on the availability of talents. Here I hope the IPCEI project will have a positive effect when it comes to generating and attracting new talents for this type of industry. What we have seen here is that there is still a lot to do at the universities to grow the academic staff, to keep up with the number of engineers we will need in this field but also with the level of education.

We will need here to stay competitive. In the past we were able to afford to do this basic training in our companies, but we also have to bear in mind that Romania is not a cheap place for R&D.

The key reason why we are here in Romania is not cost, but competence. This cost of R&D needs to be at a competitive level compared to other areas in the world where there is also talent.

We are entering into a more and more fierce competition. The authorities should improve the education environment, but also need stability in terms of taxes. There is not so much headroom to stay on a competitive edge here in Romania.

Romanian Government has to be very careful – if they are serious about growing high tech here in the country – that funds should get distributed in a smart, effective way, and all market players get a fair share of it.”