Written by Md Ismail Hossain
Bangladesh’s semiconductor industry is gaining momentum. There have been a lot of discussions and policy movements around how to take the industry forward in the last few years. Some of these efforts have created a renewed sense of optimism and dynamism in the industry.
Coming to where the industry is today has been a long and difficult journey. For a long period, the industry received meagre attention from the policymakers and the broader business community. Finding experienced talent was a major bottleneck. Bangladesh as a country wasn’t known as a serious player in the semiconductor industry.
Some of these things are now changing slowly. The industry is seeing meaningful traction. And that's worth a genuine shout-out to everyone who pushed through to come this far.
Semiconductors are a knowledge business. In Bangladesh, that knowledge has come the hard way. As I noted above, we built it without national policy. We built it without enough trained, experienced people.
While we are seeing a growing interest in and discussion around the semiconductor industry, something important is missing from the conversation.
People talk about semiconductor potential, semiconductor numbers, semiconductor growth. Few talk about our own people. We complain about a shortage of experienced engineers. We rarely talk about how to create new talent and empower the ones we already have. How to retain them. How to move them into leadership. Shortage of experienced resources is a common discussion we see around, but we don’t talk much about it locally.
The markets where the semiconductor industry did well didn’t merely succeed by copying a formula. They adopted new technology, trained their people, and let the results compound over time, inside their own culture.
It means we can't just import that. We need our own blend: global practice, local culture. And we already have the people for it. Our experienced engineers have stayed in this industry for years, often at real cost to their own careers elsewhere. Give them a little support, a little push toward leadership thinking, and they will carry this forward.
Look at the markets in South and Southeast Asia. Every country that succeeded found its own way to connect global requirements to local talent. No two did it the same way. There is no single template here, only the same underlying instinct.
And the instinct, stated plainly, is it's your people. Train them. Empower them. Let them build the company with you.
To that end, I think if you're starting a semiconductor business in Bangladesh, prioritize these six things from day one.
"Semiconductor" is a seductive word. People start companies chasing it without learning what the business actually demands. A company needs partners whose strengths cover each other's blind spots. If one partner is strong in analog design, let them own delivery and client relationships. Someone else needs to own business development, process, and operations. That someone matters just as much.
And it can't stop at the top. Build a simple, structured way to share business knowledge across the company, from the newest intern to the CEO. Everyone represents the business to the outside world, whether they realize it or not. Make sure they understand what they're representing. One well-informed junior engineer, in one client call, can shape how a global client sees the entire company.
We move fast, sometimes too fast. We see a competitor start a semiconductor venture and feel the pull to start ours tomorrow. That instinct is emotional, not strategic, and it burns capital quietly, in ways we don't notice until later.
The same impatience shows up in training. We build programs without a real curriculum, without asking what the market actually needs. Months later, we discover the gap: we trained hard, but not for what clients are hiring for. Talk to the client before you build the curriculum. Ask people with real domain knowledge what the requirements actually look like. Let that shape your training, your assignments, your interview prep. Skip this step, and you pay for it later, in time and money both.
People stay loyal to their first company. It gave them their first real chance, and that means something. If we train them well, technically and managerially, we grow our own leaders from inside. That kind of leadership carries the company's culture forward in a way no outside hire can. Give people real ownership of the business, not just a task list, and that loyalty compounds.
External hires often arrive with better pay. That's simply how the market works, and companies hire externally for a reason: fresh culture, fresh insight. But here's the tension. Some people earn more by hopping between companies than others earn by staying and performing well. That imbalance is hard to ignore. Loyal employees notice it. Some start to feel like loyalty itself is being punished, and trust in leadership erodes quietly from there. There's no easy fix. But pretending the tension doesn't exist only makes it worse.
Industry research points to a simple number: at least 10% of your team should be dedicated to sales, building relationships, and staying close to the market. Most companies skip this. They lean on outside intermediaries instead, people with no real authority to bring work into Bangladesh. Those connections help sometimes. They bring the occasional lead. But they are not a strategy, and they are not sustainable on their own.
A real sales team does more than close deals. It reads the market. It forecasts demand. It tells you who to hire next, and when. Without it, your growth plan is guesswork.
Now, this is self-explanatory. Without investment in R&D, it is hard to stay competitive in an industry like semiconductors where things change by the hour.
There is a second aspect to this, which is related to people. Some engineers want more than delivery work. After a few years of serving clients, they start to want to build, explore, and invent. Listen to that instinct. Give it a target and a little room to run.
This matters more now than it used to. AI is already reshaping the services business. Large companies are quietly reducing their reliance on junior engineers, and that pressure is only going to grow. R&D is one real answer to it. Done well, it does three things at once: a. It builds a portfolio that attracts new clients. b. It gives junior engineers real project experience. c. It occasionally produces an idea worth turning into a product.
Watch where the acquisitions happen. Big companies keep buying small ones that do one thing exceptionally well. That's not an accident. It's a signal. Specialization wins, and it wins for reasons beyond just the market: it lowers management overhead, cuts operational costs, and reduces the daily chaos of running too many things at once.
There's a human cost to spreading thin, too. When a company chases too many projects, some teams inevitably slip down the priority list. The people on those teams feel it immediately, even if no one says it out loud. And once people feel deprioritized, they start looking elsewhere. Focus isn't just a strategy. It's how you keep people.
Bangladesh's semiconductor industry has moved beyond the stage of proving its potential. That question is settled. The next challenge is building a sustainable ecosystem where business strategy, technical excellence, leadership, research, sales capability, and local talent development work together. Success will not come from copying mature semiconductor markets but from adapting global best practices to Bangladesh's unique strengths and realities.
About the author: Md Ismail Hossain is a semiconductor industry professional with 15+ years of experience in VLSI design, technical leadership, and engineering team development. He is passionate about building Bangladesh into a globally recognized semiconductor design destination through talent development, industry collaboration, and strategic ecosystem growth. He can be reached at ismail.hossain@chipmentors.com
