Recently, Intuitive — the company behind the da Vinci surgical robot — announced its first factory in Southeast Asia. Around €435 million over five years, a 29,000-square-metre facility at Bandar Cassia Technology Park in Penang, building surgical instruments and electromechanical devices for the da Vinci system. Production starts in 2028; 1,200 skilled jobs by 2032.
If you work anywhere near healthcare, you know the name. Da Vinci is the machine that made robotic surgery routine in operating theatres around the world. Its instruments will now be made a short drive from where I live.
The announcement landed at a useful moment for me, because I had just spent the summer in Finland being reminded how invisible all of this is at home.
The sauna test
On my Finland holiday, I ended up in a sauna evening with some people from the Finnish medtech and health tech scene.
These were not people who needed Malaysia explained to them. Some had a Nokia background and knew Penang through its electronics industry — the factories, the supply chain, the names on the industrial park gates.
What was new to many: that same island is one of the world's leading offshore medical device manufacturing hubs.
The industry recognises three top offshore medtech manufacturing locations — Puerto Rico, Ireland and Costa Rica. Penang is the fourth name being added to that conversation, and it already holds the highest concentration of medtech companies in Southeast Asia. My sauna company knew the island and still missed the story. That is a proper blind spot.
The numbers behind the claim
Six of the world’s top 40 medical device companies by sales manufacture in Penang: Abbott, Boston Scientific, B. Braun, Smith & Nephew, Steris and Dexcom. Approved investments in scientific and measuring equipment — the category that includes medical devices — reached about €780 million in 2020–2024, 30% of Malaysia’s total. And Penang ships roughly 73% of Malaysia’s exports in the category.
None of this came from nowhere. Penang’s medtech grew directly out of its fifty-year electronics base. The suppliers who learned precision, cleanrooms and yield making semiconductors now carry ISO 13485 and FDA certifications for medical devices. Which explains the blind spot in the sauna: the medtech hub is the E&E hub, one certification layer up. If you only ever looked at Penang through electronics, you were looking straight at it without seeing it.
Dexcom is the cleanest example of what the ecosystem can carry. The continuous glucose monitoring leader put its first factory outside the United States here — a €615 million facility that has grown to over 3,000 employees. When an American medtech company picks its first offshore site ever, the shortlist work has been done for you.
Why the timing matters
I wrote earlier in this series about supplier rosters: once a plant goes live, the roster is largely locked. Intuitive’s production starts in 2028. The decisions on equipment, automation, components, packaging, sterilisation and services are being made in the window between now and then.
Intuitive’s own manufacturing chief put a number on what that roster is worth: for every dollar spent inside the factory, the company spends about five dollars on raw materials and the supply chain around it.
The pipeline promise
When I wrote about Penang earlier, I said the state and the industry have been quietly building the talent pipeline together for years — and that it was a story for another piece. Here is one piece of it.
Penang ran 110 STEM programmes for 236,000 students last year and is doubling the effort this year. And now, in my role as a EuroCham committee head, I am helping the state leadership connect with industry in their effort to start a medtech-specific early intervention programme at secondary schools — feeding an industry that plans in decades, starting with schoolchildren.
If your company manufactures medical devices in Malaysia and wants to be part of shaping that pipeline, get in touch — we are connecting industry partners to the programme now.
What this means for Finnish medtech ecosystem players
Finland’s own medtech is strong — health technology product exports hit a record €2.79 billion last year, one of our biggest high-tech export categories. Oulu, Helsinki and Turku build world-class devices, diagnostics and health software.
What Finland does not have is a place like this: a manufacturing ecosystem where the world’s top device makers already run their offshore production, with certified suppliers, regulatory infrastructure, and a talent pipeline pointed deliberately at the industry.
If you build devices and your growth market is Asia, you can manufacture where Abbott, Boston Scientific and soon Intuitive manufacture — with a supplier base that already speaks FDA and MDR. And if you supply the medtech industry — automation, precision components, materials, software, quality systems — the Intuitive roster is being written right now.
The sauna conversation is why I wrote this. The people who should know about Penang’s medtech story are exactly the people who almost know it already. Come have a look — I’m happy to make the introductions.