On Friday I watched a new factory open in Penang — a joint venture, a year in the making. Two days earlier, ET Tan had asked on LinkedIn where Malaysia's unicorns are. I couldn't help thinking of the JOT Automation story from my hometown, Oulu, in Finland.
An automation company called JOT was founded there in the late '80s. Boring industrial automation. Not a sexy consumer product. Not a platform. A decade later it went public, market value over €1 billion in today's money. Nobody looked at a testing-equipment company in 1988 and saw a unicorn. That was rather the point. Its founder became very rich and boosted the local startup investing scene like never before. Not only did that capital anchor many local startups, it also pulled foreign VC cashflow into the local ecosystem.
So, did I watch Penang's first future unicorn open its doors on Friday? Honestly, I don't know, and I don't think anyone does yet — that's exactly the point. If Penang is looking for its own version of this pattern, it should look at the layer nobody in the unicorn conversation is asking about: industrial automation, precision manufacturing, materials, the unglamorous B2B floor that sits underneath both the semiconductor and medtech booms I've written about here before. That is also the market open to Finnish companies right now — not because Malaysia is copying Silicon Valley, but because it is quietly building the same industrial base Finland's own unicorns eventually grew out of.
If your company works in automation, materials, robotics or software — or the support and maintenance that keeps any of it running — come have a look. I'm happy to point you to the right doors. And wouldn't it be something if Penang's first unicorn had a little Finnish input in it.
Penang's next industrial chapter
The Friday opening was for a factory that belongs to SkyGate NHJ Technology Sdn Bhd, a JV established on 14 July last year — a joint venture between a subsidiary of Penang-based Skygate Integration Berhad and Singapore-registered New Jin Hai, a precision engineering house with more than three decades in the trade. A 3,345 square-metre floor, built for digitalised CNC manufacturing — horizontal and 5-axis machining, ultra-precision and thin-wall components, the kind of work semiconductor and medtech supply chains are increasingly built on.
SkyGate-NHJ's CEO, Li Jian, gave the best presentation of the day — in Chinese, with Fastems' Robert Ding interpreting. He walked through a case familiar to anyone who follows Fastems: a Chinese factory where CNC utilisation went from 35% to 95%. Whatever else that JV is or becomes, the choice of automation partner for its own new floor wasn't a cold pitch. It was a repeat customer.
Chief Minister Chow Kon Yeow officiated. Penang, he said, is already home to more than 30 automated test equipment companies, backed by over 80 ecosystem partners across automation, precision engineering and semiconductor manufacturing. He called the opening "part of Penang's next industrial chapter" — not producing more on the same fifty-year foundation, but building deeper capability on top of it.
Deputy Head of Mission Maiju Lepomäki from the Embassy of Finland talked about deepening collaboration — not only in automation, but in medtech and circular economy too. Convincing embassy reps to show up is a small part of what I actually do for a living.
Where are Malaysia's unicorns?
Two days before I stood in that factory, ET Tan asked a good question on LinkedIn: where are Malaysia's unicorns? He cited The Economist — Singapore at 2.5 unicorns per million people, the US at 2. Malaysia isn't on the list. His answer pointed at capital: too little real risk money, IPOs rushed before companies are ready, and a culture that rewards the safe salary over the long bet.
Finland asked itself the same question
I left a long comment under that post about Finland's own version of the same problem. Tesi, the state investment company, has anchored Finnish VC funds since 2008 through a fund-of-funds model — it doesn't pick companies, it makes the funds fundable, and those funds have since backed close to 500 Finnish startups. ICEYE, founded in 2014, closed a round at a €10.5 billion valuation this June, Finland's third decacorn after Supercell and Oura — twelve years of exactly the hardware timeline most local VCs won't touch. And Finland had its own salaryman problem too. Its name was Nokia. When it broke, a generation of engineers discovered there was no safe employer left to go back to, and that is where most of what we now call the Finnish startup scene actually came from.
What I didn't say in that comment is the part I want to say now. Every one of those examples, and most of the unicorn conversation generally, gets framed around consumer products — the next Grab, the next game studio. But Supercell's exit money didn't stay in games, and ICEYE isn't a consumer company at all; it sells satellite data to governments and insurers. The pattern that actually built Finland's startup capital base is older, less glamorous, and almost never gets mentioned.