The 20 Freescale employees, among 239 people on flight MH370, were mostly engineers and other experts working to make the company’s chip facilities in Tianjin, China, and Kuala Lumpur more efficient, said Mitch Haws, vice president, global communications and investor relations.

“These were people with a lot of experience and technical background and they were very important people,” Haws said. “It’s definitely a loss for the company.”

In Malaysia, Freescale’s modern operations facility that manufactures and tests integrated circuits (IC) is based in Petaling Jaya.