Innovate and Transform: Ticket to Next Pinnacle

John T. Yu, Group Chairman of CTCI

While adjusting to the new normal at the post-pandemic era, the world continues to be handling waves of uncertainties brought by factors such as the extreme weather and geopolitical conflicts. For businesses, this is a period where challenges can be turned into opportunities. Other than being cautious of the impact of COVID-19 variants, businesses must respond to the international sustainability trend and grasp this opportunity for the restructuring of global supply chain to actively innovate and transform themselves and rise to new heights. 

Looking back on 2021, CTCI continued to achieve excellence in business performance from the previous year as a number of large-scale projects at home and abroad are being implemented. We accomplished outstanding results in multiple aspects, including NT$70.5 billion in revenue, NT$125.9 billion in new contracts, and NT$322.7 billion in backlog of contracts while receiving various recognitions in terms of corporate governance, branding efforts, and sustainability performance. Honors we garnered include being listed with the Top 100 international engineering companies by Engineering News-Record (ENR), being selected as a component in Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) Emerging Markets Index, attaining first place in the contractor category in a survey of 2000 enterprises carried out by the CommonWealth Magazine, achieving Top 5% in corporate governance evaluation, receiving the Best Companies to Work For in Asia Award by HR Asia, being awarded The Most Prestigious Sustainability Awards - Top Ten Domestic Corporate presented by the Taiwan Corporate Sustainability Awards (TCSA), winning CommonWealth Magazine's Excellence in Corporate Social Responsibility Award, as well as receiving an A rating in the MSCI ESG Rating. These excellent achievements affirmed the efforts and contributions from all the members of CTCI in the past year. 

Looking forward to 2022, in addition to making innovations and breakthroughs in existing business sectors, CTCI will also continue to invest in areas with developmental potential, such as green engineering and the high-tech. At the same time, CTCI will intensify the development and application of intelligent solutions, drive global sustainability and net zero carbon emissions trends, as well as actively deploying and planning strategies to continue being a strong player in the international engineering market and lead the global supply chain to move towards sustainability.

Three Major Aspects of Green Engineering, the Win-win Solution for Our Economy and Environment

CTCI remains dedicated in the practice of sustainability with the operation of its principal business and by promoting and implementing the three major categories of "Green Engineering," namely green technology, green contracting, and green investments. Not only have we been successful in expanding business in the low-carbon and environmental protection related engineering, we have also assisted our owners to achieve the goals of energy saving, carbon reduction, and cost saving. At the same time, we continue working together with our suppliers and partners to arrive at win-win solutions for the economy and the environment with our engineering expertise. Below are introductions to our threefold plan for green engineering.

1.Green Technology
As a turnkey project contractor, CTCI incorporates "green technology" into the engineering life cycle while designing and constructing plants for our clients, and is committed to reducing environmental impacts, such as using energy-saving lights, rotary machineries, or using more water-saving, power-saving, and more efficient manufacturing processes. For example, through the application of green technology, we have reduced CO₂ emissions by 12 million metric tons between 2018 and 2020 for energy saved in projects we served for clients, equivalent to the carbon adsorption capacity of 32,000 Daan Forest Parks in one year; we also have tangible results in waste reduction, recycling, and reuse. These data have been certified by SGS and included in our corporate sustainability report. In addition to saving costs, we also contribute to the sustainability of the Earth.

2.Green Contracting
Under the national energy transition policy of reducing coal-fired power generation, increasing share of natural gas, and promoting green energy, the low-carbon and green energy projects undertaken by CTCI have grown year by year. Taking a look at our backlog of contracts, we see that the contracted amount of low-carbon and environmental related projects have grown by 450% from 2015 to 2021. In the wind power sector, we recently delivered underwater foundation pin piles for Changfang & Xidao Offshore Wind Farm; in the power plants and LNG sector, there are the Hsinta and Taichung Combined-Cycle Power Plant contracts, the third LNG terminal, and other major constructions for Taiwan's energy transition; as to green and smart building, the second CTCI headquarters building we recently completed is the most exemplary in this category; in energy/resource reuse, we have contracted TCC DAKA Recycling Center, Kaohsiung Fengshan River Reclaimed Water Plant BTO Project, and the biodiesel plant new construction project in the US, etc. These green energy related projects we have worked on are the best evidence of our efforts toward environmental preservation.

3.Green Investments
We have also been engaged in green investments through Build-Own-Operate (BOO) and Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) models. In the incineration plants sector, we are the largest incineration plant operator in Taiwan. Our recent track records include the Taoyuan Biomass Energy Center and the Changbin Industrial Park Resource Processing Center. In the field of solar photovoltaics, the installed power generation capacity of projects we have invested and contracted have exceeded 126MW. In the field of water resource reuse, there is the Linkou Water Recycling Center, Southern Taiwan Science Park WWRU DBOO Project, and the Chungli Sewerage System BOT Project in Taoyuan. The above-mentioned projects will be delivered with excellent operating performance; we are proud of these projects as they contribute to a more sustainable world.

Stepping into High-tech Engineering, Seizing New Opportunities in Global Supply Chain

As the global demand for high-end chips continues to rise in the high-tech sector, countries have spawned a wave of localization of semiconductor manufacturing. This has led to a restructuring of the global supply chain and created huge potential business opportunities.

CTCI has successfully mastered this trend by resorting to our core engineering capabilities in planning and design, plant construction, and the high-end clean room. Following the establishment of the Advanced Technology Facility Business Operation (ATFBO) at the beginning of last year, we have been awarded a turnkey construction project in Arizona from Taiwan's leading semiconductor manufacturer, as well as the plant construction of its supply chain manufacturers. We are currently pursuing business opportunities in recycling/reusing waste isopropanol IPA and wastewater generated during the semiconductor manufacturing process. We have also successfully expanded our work towards energy storage sector and obtained the construction project of the first mega battery factory in Taiwan—the Molie Quantum Energy Corporation lithium battery factory, as well as the construction project of a new DRAM plant from a major global DRAM manufacturer.

In the future, we will be focusing on five areas in the high-tech sector, namely semiconductors, communications (data center), electro-optical engineering, precision testing, and computer peripherals. With the active expansion of business in the high-tech engineering sector, we are confident that we can create a long-term and strong growth momentum as well as provide professional services of exceptional quality to our global customers.

Create Unique Selling Points by Fine-tuning Intelligent Solutions

The corporate culture of CTCI is based on "professionalism, teamwork, integrity, and innovation." With 40 years of experience, we are committed to building a reputation in the industry to be known for speed, quality, industrial safety, efficiency, intellectual property protection in relation to our services. By creating our Unique Selling Point (USP), CTCI as a brand will grow more in value and distinctiveness.

We also continue to focus on the development and application of Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), robots, and other technologies in engineering. In particular, CTCI’s exclusive intelligent EPC (iEPC) turnkey engineering platform has entered its 2.0 stage, which not only optimizes the efficiency and quality of each of the EPC stages, it also shows significant benefits to the improvement of industrial safety, the reduction of errors, and the saving of costs. Last year, we have established a digital handover system utilizing digital twin technology; currently, we are working on applications of augmented realities (AR) to develop digital EPC and digital O&M services to our clients with enhanced convenience.

Another example is the recently developed intelligent management (iManagement) system. The goal is to use IT, robotic process automation (RPA), AI, and other technologies to digitalize/automate repetitive and tedious work processes so that productivity of our staff can be redirected to more creative areas of work, to enhance the overall organizational competiveness and effectiveness.

Through the innovative research and development of iEPC and iManagement, we continue to improve work quality and performance, hoping to get faster, better, and more competitive in our services, making "intelligent solutions" the most powerful USP of CTCI.

Be the First to Achieve Net Zero EPC, Expand Sustainable Influence

During the United Nations COP26 Climate Change Conference, all countries jointly announced the goal of limiting the increase in the global average temperature to below 1.5°C, and Taiwan has also pledged to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. With the emergence of carbon rights and carbon tariffs in the near future, it will inevitably lead to a reshaping of the international trade landscape, a major issue for the global industry. The key at this moment lies in how to adapt to the trend and turn crisis into opportunity.

As the largest turnkey engineering group in Taiwan and the top 100 in the world, CTCI cannot stay out of it. In order to further respond to the international carbon reduction and net zero goals, we are promoting "net zero EPC" by actively proposing energy-saving, carbon-reduction, and carbon neutral service solutions at all stages of the EPC and joined the "Taiwan Alliance for Net Zero Emission" and the "Taiwan Net Zero Emissions Association," pledging to achieve zero carbon emissions for office premises by 2030 and zero carbon emissions for offices and project sites by 2050. Furthermore, in order to drive Taiwan’s engineering industry to keep up with the global sustainable development, we organized the first "Taiwan Sustainability Engineering Symposium" together with the CTCI Education Foundation (CTCI EF), focusing on intelligent green technology and sharing CTCI’s performances and experiences on iEPC and Green Engineering. Nearly 200 experts and scholars from the industry, academia, research sectors, our suppliers, and partners were invited to participate in this grand event, in the hope that we would lead the way in the net-zero EPC turnkey plant construction initiative and expand the impact of sustainable projects.

In addition, according to the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs), we consider advocating "lifelong learning" one of the important ways to fulfill corporate social responsibility. In addition to building an online learning platform, "CTCI University," for training our 7,000 personnel around the world, CTCI has also launched a digital platform, "CTCI Learning," offering hundreds of engineering courses to the public and academic units for free in order to pass on our professional engineering knowledge and experience, with the hope of upgrading the engineering industry in Taiwan.

Looking forward to the new year, CTCI will continue to grasp the international trends in the ever-changing environment and commit to business growth, innovation, and transformation. Meanwhile, through clearly defining CTCI’s USP, it would help differentiate ourselves from competitors and enhance our "Most Reliable" brand value towards realizing our vision of being "The Most Reliable Global Engineering Services Provider."