Asia’s next Silicon Valley takes shape in Penang (Video)

PETALING JAYA: Asia's next Silicon Valley is taking shape in Penang with a growing number of successful hardware start-ups making the island its home base.
It has grown into a hardware hub with emphasis on the tech world through hardware manufacturing.
The growing ecosystem has caught international attention with the BBC being the latest to highlight Penang's potential as Asia's next Silicon Valley.
Channel News Asia reported that the establishment of a free trade zone - now called the Free Industrial Zone - in Bayan Lepas more than 40 years ago drew many big-name multinationals like Intel, AMD and Hewlett Packard to set up shop in the northern state.
This strong base in manufacturing has, according to state investment promotion agency InvestPenang, led to Penang becoming known as the "Silicon Valley of the East" - and also stood the city's thriving start-up community in good stead, the report said.
"In the past, a lot of our focus was on manufacturing and a lot of our start-ups were in manufacturing," it quoted InvestPenang General Manager Loo Lee Lian as saying. "The engineers who were working in the MNCs felt that they could do things on their own better than being employed by the MNCs, so they came out and started their own manufacturing companies."
Watch the video here: