Used semiconductor equipment broker comes to Europe
The online focus of Moov and the global nature of the internet means Moov has already been present in Europe to an extent, but is now becoming more active and is committing to develop its supporting ecosystem in Europe in terms of logistics and pre- and after-sales support.
The company was founded in January 2018 by Steven Zhou (CEO) and Maxam Yeung (head of sales and business development) and has grown rapidly by supporting the sale of second-hand front-end and back-end equipment, ATE, electronic manufacturing services and packaging equipment.
Moov aims to reduce what had been the industry norm transaction times of weeks to days and to eliminate another second-hand market bugbear, inaccurate and out-of-date listings. In that way the company expects to strip cost out of the used market compared with other brokerages. Zhou and Yeung both worked at Oolong and Capital Asset & Exchange Trading LLC, two companies involved in the same market, before founding Moov.
Jason Zeng, an investor in Moov characterized the established broker model for used semiconductor manufacturing equipment as being heavily manual and error prone. Moov is online-oriented and software automates documentation, information sharing, contracts, payments, logistics and add-on services.
Typically, Moov users pay between a quarter and a third of the cost of the new machine, the company claimed in a statement announcing a funding round that closed in January 2020.
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Jillian Kushner, interim vice president of marketing, said Moov has more than $1 billion of active listings on its website. And now Moov is hiring people in Europe to help with managing logistics and pre- and after-sales and is looking to build an ecosystem of companies to support sales and transfers. These can be equipment refurbishers, parts and service suppliers and reliable shippers, Kushner said.
Kushner said Moov also expects to be able to use the market knowledge it acquires through matching un-needed equipment with users, to provide industry analysis. “Our goal is to add transparency to the market and also to provide market data and analysis,” she said. Kushner said the secondary semiconductor manufacturing equipment is worth between $5 billion and $10 billion a year and that Moov is already mediates a significant part of that.
Moov is turning to Europe after growing rapidly in 2019 selling in to the Asia-Pacific region.
The company was already profitable by the end of 2019. The US-China trade war boosted Moov’s growth in 2019 as Chinese companies scrambled to buy equipment before trade tensions became worse, the company said in its January 2020 press statement. Strong sales into China have continued in 2020 and Kushner said that China was the destination for about 35 percent of Moov-mediated sales in the first three-quarters of 2020.
Moov is also aware that the situation regarding semiconductor equipment sales is becoming increasingly complex. Kushner said the company has a legal team in place to ensure compliance with regulations and keep abreast of any changes.
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