The early 1990s were like a gold rush for the memory market. That year Apple introduced its PowerBook, the first website was created, and Paul Heng began trading memory under the company name “Henusa.”
Heng recognized the opportunity to bridge the gap between dominant overseas memory manufacturers and growing domestic demand in the United States. His timing could not have been better, and today Unigen Corporation is one of the few remaining privately held mainstays of the Silicon Valley community.
From Merchant to Maker -The name Henusa, Heng recalls, lasted for a while, until a friend told him that in Chinese the name literally appeared as “chicken of USA.” To avoid any fowl wordplay, Heng changed the name to Unigen, a hardy combination of “united” and as a nod to his friend, “gentleman.” At the time, says Heng, Japanese products were synonymous with quality and reliability. “I had built up a level of trust with several partners in Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and was able to cut deals worth nearly a million dollars with just a phone call,” he says. However, Heng didn’t arrive at the point by accident. “Back in those days, I spent countless hours in my car driving around Silicon Valley and knocking on doors to find those deals.” Eventually, Heng realized that in order to truly add value to his customers, he needed to move the company into product manufacturing. Turning the memory into modules, not just reselling it. The first product Unigen offered was a PC133 SDRAM module. At the time, a 4 Mb (512k x 8) SDRAM module sold for $55. Since establishing manufacturing capability, Unigen has leveraged its expertise in memory to grow into other adjacent markets, such as SSDs and enterprise I/O products. The company continues to grow its manufacturing footprint, both in the U.S. and overseas in Vietnam. The drive to push the company forward was there from the beginning for Heng. “I am a firm believer that if you do not expand ahead of the curve, you trend toward irrelevance. Customers simply won’t wait for you.”
Adding EMS – To better use its capacity and to further diversify, Unigen expanded into contract manufacturing around the year 2011, complementing its OEM business. Heng says, “We were doing a lot of business with a large hyperscale company in the Bay area. They approached us and asked if we would be open to a CM model and, of course, I wanted to support them any way that I could. At the same time, we expanded our manufacturing footprint aggressively to stay in front of our customers’ needs. We had become so concentrated on one or two companies driving our factory utilization that we needed to diversify our business in order to ride through any downside in demand.”
Today, he added that Unigen has more than 320,000 square feet of manufacturing space, offering full turnkey services to both internal and external partners. “It’s a tale of two Unigens,” Heng says. “One side is the EMS business and the other is the OEM product side, with the EMS side being just as important as the OEM side.”
Unigen’s primary markets and customers service the cloud, and include data centers, enterprise server and storage, networking, and more. While Unigen is still anchored in memory and storage technology, it has adapted its business model over time to meet the demands of the industry.
The company now offers a full suite of electronic manufacturing services, from NPI to full production, as well as specialty services such as test-as-a-service (TaaS) and remarketing. It has entered into new product areas such as NVDIMMs through the acquisition of AgigA Tech from Infineon Technologies. Heng has also established inhouse sheet metal capabilities by bringing Coraza (a Malaysiabased company) under the Unigen umbrella.
The company has facilities placed strategically around the world, with Vietnam being home to its largest manufacturing site. Its goal is to have each site be able to replicate its production processes exactly, allowing the company to expand into the electric vehicle and medical device markets with the same level of quality and reliability throughout.
Apart from meeting strict quality standards, this distributed manufacturing capacity ensures supply chain continuity in the event of an issue or emergency in certain locations. “We strive for longevity, to be a trusted partner in the longterm, not just a transactional relationship to turn a quick profit. We offer flexibility in order to meet the changing needs of our customers and the industry,” Heng adds.
Trust, credibility, flexibility, ease of doing business, and longevity/long-term partnerships. These values are at the core of Unigen. With more than three decades of experience, the memory and storage technology leader prides itself on its industry reputation as a company that can be trusted not to cut corners, not to renege on its promises, to place quality at the forefront of its decisions, and to meet its commitments. Unigen accomplishes this by having the flexibility to adapt at both the company and customer levels and for having the capability of manufacturing at scale with high quality and reliability.
Having recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, Unigen has remained true to its roots, first and foremost as a technology leader with expertise in memory and storage. However, the company’s staying power has not been without its challenges and adversity, and by being flexible it has been able to adapt its business to the changing markets and environment.
Contact: Unigen Corp. 39730 Eureka Drive, Newark, CA 94560
510-896-1818
