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  • Kulicke and Soffa Industries, Inc. Announces CEO Transition

    Kulicke and Soffa Industries, Inc. Announces CEO Transition

    Lester Wong to Serve as Interim CEO; Board of Directors Initiates Process to Identify Permanent Successor; Dr. Fusen Chen to Retire for Health Reasons

    SINGAPORE, Oct. 28, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Kulicke and Soffa Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ: KLIC) (“Kulicke & Soffa”, “K&S”, “we” or the “Company”) today announced that Dr. Fusen Chen has agreed to retire from his position as President and CEO, and as a member of the Board, effective December 1, 2025, due to health reasons. Following the effective date, Dr. Chen will serve as an advisor to the Board for a 12-month period. The Board has initiated a process to identify the Company’s next permanent CEO. The search will include internal and external candidates.

    Effective immediately, the Board of Directors has appointed Lester Wong, the Company’s current Executive Vice President, Finance and IT and Chief Financial Officer, as the Company’s Interim CEO. As Dr. Chen transitions from his role and in leading up to his retirement, he will support Lester Wong in ensuring a smooth transition and handover. Mr. Wong will also continue in his existing roles during this transitional period.

    “We are profoundly grateful to Fusen for his visionary leadership, unwavering commitment, and remarkable achievements during his nine-year tenure as CEO and President,” said Peter Kong, Chairman of the K&S Board. “Fusen’s dedication to innovation and operational excellence has enabled K&S to grow and create value for shareholders. His leadership has solidified the Company’s core served market positions while accelerating its position at the forefront of advanced packaging and dispense technologies. His legacy will continue to inspire our organization for years to come. On behalf of the Board and the entire K&S family, I extend our heartfelt thanks and wish Fusen good health and success in his next chapter.”

    “It has been a great honor to serve as Kulicke & Soffa’s CEO,” said Dr. Fusen Chen, President and CEO of K&S. “I thank our incredible team for their support. Together, we have navigated unprecedented global challenges with resilience and agility while building on the 75-year track record of innovation to unlock new opportunities across our markets, drive significant growth and create value for our shareholders. I am proud to have been a part of this progress and have the utmost confidence in K&S’ future.”

    Mr. Kong added, “The Board has commenced a comprehensive search to identify the right leader to continue driving K&S’ strong momentum, expand our market share, further enhance our diverse portfolio and help our customers address critical challenges in the industry. As Executive Vice President and CFO, Lester has played an instrumental role in the Company’s success and we are confident that he will continue to drive K&S’ growth and innovation during this interim period.”

    Mr. Kong concluded, “Together with the Board, I will assist Lester and the Executive Leadership Team in ensuring the continuity of leadership, stability and strategic focus of the Company. We believe this collaborative approach is critical as the Company is ushering through a period of exciting growth, driven by continued core-market improvement and capacity expansion, coupled with strong demand in sectors like AI, electric vehicles, and power semiconductors. We are investing in next-generation solutions such as ATPremier MEM PlusTM and expanding our capabilities in fluxless thermocompression bonding and chiplet integration. With a solid financial foundation and a clear strategic roadmap, we are well-positioned to support our customers’ evolving needs and deliver long-term value.”

    “I look forward to assuming the interim CEO position and working closely with Peter, the Board and the entire Executive Leadership Team as the Board conducts its search for a permanent CEO to lead K&S into its next phase,” said Lester Wong, Executive Vice President, Finance and IT and CFO of K&S. “I am confident in the clear strategy we’ve established, which positions us to continue driving our leadership across semiconductor assembly technology and unlock meaningful value for our shareholders.”

    K&S Reaffirms its Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2025 Outlook

    In connection with today’s announcement, the Company reaffirmed its fourth quarter fiscal 2025 outlook. The Company intends to announce its fourth quarter fiscal 2025 financial results on November 19, 2025.

    About Lester Wong

    Mr. Wong, 59, has been the Company’s Chief Financial Officer since December 2018, and was promoted to Executive Vice President, from Senior Vice President, on January 1, 2022. Prior to that, Mr. Wong served as General Counsel & Senior Vice President, Legal Affairs beginning in September 2011. Mr. Wong has over 20 years of legal leadership at U.S. listed and Asian-based companies, with a wealth of experience in global corporate law. Previously, Mr. Wong served as General Counsel and held other senior legal positions at publicly traded companies including Gigamedia Limited and CDC Corporation.

    About Kulicke & Soffa

    Kulicke & Soffa is a global leader in semiconductor assembly technology, advancing device performance across automotive, compute, industrial, memory and communications markets. Founded on innovation in 1951, K&S is uniquely positioned to overcome increasingly dynamic process challenges – creating and delivering long-term value by aligning technology with opportunity.

    Contacts

    Kulicke & Soffa
    Marilyn Sim 
    Public Relations 
    +65-6880 9309 
    msim@kns.com       

    Kulicke & Soffa
    Joseph Elgindy
    Finance
    +1-215-784-7500 
    investor@kns.com

     

    SOURCE Kulicke & Soffa Industries, Inc.

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  • Parry-Romberg Syndrome With Localized Scleroderma: A Report of Two Pediatric Cases From Oman

    Parry-Romberg Syndrome With Localized Scleroderma: A Report of Two Pediatric Cases From Oman

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  • Rust Rewrite Enables Cloudflare to Boost CDN Performance and Enhance Security

    Rust Rewrite Enables Cloudflare to Boost CDN Performance and Enhance Security

    By adopting Rust for one of its core subsystems, Cloudflare succeeded in reducing response time by 10 ms and boosting performance by 25%. Additionally, the company emphasized that Rust made their system more secure and reduced…

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  • Warnings Mount Over Windows Server Update Services Hacks

    Warnings Mount Over Windows Server Update Services Hacks

    Thousands of Windows Server Update Services Observed Online

    Akshaya Asokan (asokan_akshaya) …

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  • Surfshark’s New AI Feature Takes a Bite Out of Scam Emails

    Surfshark’s New AI Feature Takes a Bite Out of Scam Emails

    Targeted scam emails could be a thing of the past for Surfshark’s One and One-plus bundle subscribers. Surfshark is a VPN company and security tool that’s adding a scam email checker that weeds phishing attacks out of subscribers’ Gmail…

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  • As ochre sea star ‘baby boomers’ grow up, species showing signs of recovery

    As ochre sea star ‘baby boomers’ grow up, species showing signs of recovery

    …

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  • New method could improve manufacturing of gene-therapy drugs | MIT News

    New method could improve manufacturing of gene-therapy drugs | MIT News

    Some of the most expensive drugs currently in use are gene therapies to treat specific diseases, and their high cost limits their availability for those who need them. Part of the reason for the cost is that the manufacturing process yields as much as 90 percent non-active material, and separating out these useless parts is slow, leads to significant losses, and is not well adapted to large-scale production. Separation accounts for almost 70 percent of the total gene therapy manufacturing cost. But now, researchers at MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Center for Biomedical Innovation have found a way to greatly improve that separation process.

    The findings are described in the journal ACS Nano, in a paper by MIT Research Scientist Vivekananda Bal, Edward R. Gilliland Professor Richard Braatz, and five others.

    “Since 2017, there have been around 10,000 clinical trials of gene therapy drugs,” Bal says. Of those, about 60 percent are based on adeno-associated virus, which is used as a carrier for the modified gene or genes. These viruses consist of a sort of shell structure, known as capsids, that protects the genetic material within, but the production systems used to manufacture these drugs tend to produce large quantities of empty capsids with no genetic material inside.

    These empty capsids, which can make up anywhere from half to 90 percent of the yield, are useless therapeutically, and in fact can be counterproductive because they can add to any immune reaction in the patient without providing any benefit. They must be removed prior to the formulation as a part of the manufacturing process. The existing purification processes are not scalable and involve multiple stages, have long processing times, and incur high product losses and high cost. 

    Separating full from empty capsids is complicated by the fact that in almost every way, they appear nearly identical. “They both have similar structure, the same protein sequences,” Bal says. “They also have similar molecular weight, and similar density.” Given the similarity, it’s extremely challenging to separate them. “How do you come up with a method?”

    Most systems presently use a method based on chromatography, in which the mixture passes through a column of absorbent material, and slight differences in the properties can cause them to pass through at different rates, so that they can be separated out. Because the differences are so slight, the process requires multiple rounds of processing, in addition to filtration steps, adding to the time and cost. The method is also inefficient, wasting up to 30 or 40 percent of the product, Bal says. And the resulting product is still only about two-thirds pure, with a third of inactive material remaining.

    There is another purification method that is widely used in the small molecule pharmaceutical industry, which uses a preferential crystallization process instead of chromatography, but this method had not been tried for protein purification — specifically, capsid-based drugs — before. Bal decided to try it, since with this method “its operating time is low and the product loss is also very low, and the purity achieved is very, very high because of the high selectivity,” he says. The method separates out empty from full capsids in the solution, as well as separating out cell debris and other useless material, all in one step, without requiring the significant pre-processing and post-processing steps needed by the other methods.

    “The time required for purification using the crystallization method is around four hours, compared to that required for the chromatography method, which is about 37 to 40 hours,” he says. “So basically, it is about 10 times more effective in terms of operating time.” This novel method will reduce the cost of gene therapy drugs by five to 10 times, he says.

    The method relies on a very slight difference in the electrical potential of the full versus empty capsids. DNA molecules have a slight negative charge, whereas the surface of the capsids has a positive charge. “Because of that, the overall charge density distribution of the full capsids will be different from that of the empty capsids,” he says. That difference leads to a difference in the crystallization rates, which can be used to create conditions that favor the crystallization of the full capsids while leaving the empty ones behind.

    Tests proved the effectiveness of the method, which can be easily adapted to large-scale pharmaceutical manufacturing processes, he says. The team has applied for a patent through MIT’s Technology Licensing Office, and is already in discussions with a number of pharmaceutical companies about beginning trials of the system, which could lead to the system becoming commercialized within a couple of years, Bal says.

    “They’re basically collaborating,” he says of the companies. “They’re transferring their samples for a trial with our method,” and ultimately the process will either be licensed to a company, or form the basis of a new startup company, he says.

    In addition to Bal and Braatz, the research team also included Jacqueline Wolfrum, Paul Barone, Stacy Springs, Anthony Sinskey, and Robert Kotin, all of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Innovation. The work was supported by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, Sanofi S.A., Sartorius AG, Artemis Life Sciences, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

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  • Breaking down the 12 group-stage matches in Riyadh

    Breaking down the 12 group-stage matches in Riyadh

    At long last, the WTA Finals is upon us.

    A culmination of the 2025 season, the WTA Finals in Riyadh pits the eight best singles players and eight best doubles teams in the world in a round-robin format.

    Here’s a refresher…

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  • Seagate forecasts second-quarter results above estimates on AI strength – Reuters

    1. Seagate forecasts second-quarter results above estimates on AI strength  Reuters
    2. Seagate Earnings Are Imminent; These Most Accurate Analysts Revise Forecasts Ahead Of Earnings Call  Benzinga
    3. Live: Will Seagate (STX) Pop After Q1 Earnings?  24/7 Wall St.
    4. PREVIEW: Seagate falls ahead of qtrly results  TradingView
    5. Seagate: Fiscal Q1 Earnings Snapshot  News-Times

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  • ‘Miracle’ photo captures Comet Lemmon and meteor seemingly entwined over Earth

    ‘Miracle’ photo captures Comet Lemmon and meteor seemingly entwined over Earth

    An astronomer recently aimed his telescope above Manciano, Italy, and caught something incredible: a bright comet seemingly wrapped up in the corkscrewing trail of a meteor, glittering in the same patch of sky like a cosmic barber shop pole.

    With…

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