Wai Lo 盧葦

Wai is a Senior Director of Strategic Business Development with different subsidiaries of the Hanwha group in Silicon Valley, or the San Francisco Bay Area, in California, USA. Hanwha is a Korean company with an annual revenue of around $35 billion US dollars and global operations in a wide range of industries, such as solar, energy projects, petrochemicals, construction, real estate, holiday resorts, department stores and life insurance.

Before joining Hanwha in 2011, Wai was a Senior Director of Technology with Silexos, a technology incubator of Pinnacle Ventures, which is one of the major venture capital firms in the Valley. In this role, Wai led a team in developing platform technologies for the cleantech sectors, and was responsible for creating intellectual properties, strategic partnerships, technology scouting and fund raising. Prior to moving to the cleantech sector, Wai held various engineering and management positions in different semiconductor companies, including Spansion (a flash memory company), ON Semiconductors (a power device company) and LSI Logic (an ASIC company), leading teams in technology development and transfer, new business ventures and manufacturing operations.

In addition to these full time positions, Wai managed to serve the professional communities in his spare time. He was on the Board of Directors of Silent Power, an energy storage company, assisting the company in fund raising, key executives hiring and operation strategies tailoring. He also served for five years on the Technical Advisory Board of the Semiconductor Research Corporation in the US, reviewing and assigning research funding, and assumed the position as the Chair of FEP Center. These were in addition to serving on various organizing committees of international conferences and industry shows.

Being an intellect at heart, Wai constantly searches for intellectual value adding to his day to day industrial work. Today he has twenty seven US patents and, together with his previous work in academia, more than eighty refereed publications.

Wai was a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Houston, Texas, USA before joining the industries in 2001. In this capacity, Wai taught gradual and undergraduate courses in materials engineering, and led a group in electronic and superconducting materials research. This was a continuation of his academic career at the University of Cambridge, were he was a Senior Research Associate, Croucher Fellow and Research Associate of Girton College. Wai obtained a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in Physics and Materials Science under the supervision of Professor Yao Liang, and was awarded an Honors Diploma in Physics and Mathematics by Hong Kong Baptist College in 1986.

Currently

In his current position with Hanwha, Wai’s group is responsible for different aspects of strategic business development, including technology scouting, asset valuation, venture investment, asset acquisition, partnership, product strategy and roadmap, market analysis, go-to-market strategy and strategic customer acquisition.