Staying Active in China Despite Travel and Business Restrictions

Soitec has been active in China with a PR presence since 2012, missing few opportunities to stay in touch with their market. In the middle of a 3-year record growth period and with crucial business interests in China, Soitec was set to have an active 2020 on the ground in China.

As the pandemic has resulted in sudden cancelation of offline events, it created a challenge for Soitec to attend offline summits and was looking for alternative communication strategies and activities that could help them maintain their communications with their existing stakeholders and building brand awareness with new stakeholders in the virtual world – as the days of in-person events became very rare due to the pandemic’s safety measures.

Influence Matters’ team understood the pain points and immediately began to create new communication plans that would work best under this new unprecedent situation. The team suggested Soitec to maintain media relations through virtual interviews with top-tier media in China.

To cope with conferences and summits turned online, with a few offline but which Soitec executives could not attend due to travel restrictions, the Influence Matters team proposed a plan based on the same level of activity as regular years, but made of hybrid press events, and securing Soitec’s virtual presence at high-level industry event with an impressive showing of strength and a message of support and the outlook of a better world through better technology.

Media activities generated 450 media clippings from top tier semicon and business media – namely Voice 问芯, SemiInsights 半导体行业观察, and EET China 电子工程专辑. Along with 86% growth in followers and 8.8K views generated on Soitec’s WeChat official account.