MicroVue in £20m Taiwan investment

The investment by MicroVue, based in Dalgety Bay, Fife, is thought to be the biggest by a Scottish company in Taiwan in recent years.

Gordon Woolley, MicroVue’s president, visited the Far Eastern country last week to discuss setting up a factory in the Hsinchu area to the north of the island.

Over 10,000 jobs have been lost in the electronics sector in Scotland over the past three years, largely as a result of large inward investors switching production to low-cost locations overseas.

MicroVue said it had never intended to set up a mass production facility in Scotland but stressed that the 27 staff at its development centre and 20,000 sq ft plant producing prototypes in Fife would not be relocated.

A spokesman for Scipher, MicroVue’s London-based holding company, said: "Manufacturing in Scotland was not part of the deal which we struck [when MicroVue was set up] in 2000."

He said plans for a factory, which could be built by the end of the year, were under way and global demand for displays appeared to be strong.

The company has received interest from potential customers in Japan, China and the US.

Products which could use the display include camera viewfinders, projectors, monitors, television sets and headsets for the military, medical and simulation markets.

One application could be "virtual reality" sets resembling wraparound sunglasses which would present simulated scenes for military exercises.

Reports from Taiwan said MicroVue would invest up to 20m in the plant, where construction is expected to start this autumn.

But Scipher said local Taiwanese companies were expected to put up a large proportion of the money. One Taiwanese source said that around 30,000 chips per week would be made at the factory.

No figure for the number of jobs created has yet been released.

A Scottish Enterprise spokesman said the agency was not concerned about manufacturing jobs going to the Far East instead of Scotland on this occasion.

He said: "If we are talking about low-level production skills, we can no longer compete on a low-cost basis. But the knowledge behind developing and producing the product will remain in Scotland."

MicroVue developed a manufacturing system and produced trial runs of displays using technology licensed from Scipher, which holds a 64% stake in the Scottish company.

Responsibility for building the plant rests with PicVue, a Taiwanese liquid crystal display company which holds a 22% stake in MicroVue. The remaining shares are held by two Taiwanese companies, Ta Yih Ta Investment and Xcitek.

MicroVue made a pre-tax loss of 3m on a turnover of 210,000 in the year to March 2002. Scipher made a loss of 2.4m on a turnover of 9.9m in the same period.

MicroVue recently landed its first major customer, Optigone of France, which will use its displays in optical switching devices for the telecommunications industry. Employee numbers increased from 17 to 27 between 2001 and 2002 as MicroVue stepped up prototype production at its Fife base.

Scipher is a technology development and licensing group which invests in companies working on new high-tech products. Its past successes include the medical CT scanner which won the Nobel prize for its inventor. Ken Gray, Scipher chairman, became a director of MicroVue in January this year.

David Macintosh, one of MicroVue’s founding directors, now heads a spin-out from the same group which has just won a 500,000 deal in the US.

Accuscene, which is also based in Dalgety Bay, has developed a high-definition screen which can be used as a viewfinder for film cameras.

The company recently won a deal with Panavision, which makes movie cameras for Hollywood. It is working with the Design Council on a project called Humanising Technology.

Accuscene and MicroVue make up part of Scotland’s small but advanced display technology industry.

MicroEmissive Displays, based in Edinburgh, is the most high-profile new company in the sector. MED, a spin-out from Napier and Edinburgh universities, has won more than 8m in funding for a tiny screen which will be used in digital cameras and mobile phones.

Peter Denyer, MED’s chairman, spun out Vision Group, a camera technology company, from Edinburgh University in 1990 and oversaw its takeover by ST Microelectronics of Italy for 23m in 1999.

Briefing

MicroVue’s display consists of a silicon chip with more than a million pixels etched onto its surface. This is coated by ferroelectric liquid crystal.

Each pixel can emit red, green or blue light 10,000 times per second. Other colours can be created by switching rapidly between red, green and blue. Shading can be introduced by switching the display off more or less often.

The result is a powerful, compact screen that produces high quality images that do not break down into different colours when examined closely, unlike a conventional TV or computer monitor.