You should consider doing a followup piece for Korean firms (Samsung, SK Hynix) with similar dynamics with top technical leadership coming from similar backgrounds.
Cheryl this is all thoughtfully presented. Thank you. I wish there were reasonably rational actors at the White House who were able to see it and empathise with TSMC. However, there aren’t, and TSMC is therefore facing an existential crisis. As you point out, it has too many eggs in the Taiwan basket and it now has to deal with a US President who has a strategic worldview in which Taiwan is an unacceptable geopolitical risk AND who knows his voters will never read your Substack post but instead cheer his decision to “bring their jobs back”. TSMC has to stop thinking about how wonderfully productive their Taiwanese engineers are and start tallying the projected cost of building more capacity in the US. Margins are going to have to go down. It’s the price of security. The bill for the so-called “silicon shield” is coming due and it will have to be paid, I’m afraid to say. The real question is how good the company is at American-style PR. How best to spin it?
Good point
To add on to that, TSMC mentioned in its annual report how to court the talent they need from specific domestic and foreign unis (see "大學合作計劃" section at https://investor.tsmc.com/sites/ir/annual-report/2023/2023%20Annual%20Report-C_1.pdf).
Thank you for pitching in on this!
You should consider doing a followup piece for Korean firms (Samsung, SK Hynix) with similar dynamics with top technical leadership coming from similar backgrounds.
Cheryl this is all thoughtfully presented. Thank you. I wish there were reasonably rational actors at the White House who were able to see it and empathise with TSMC. However, there aren’t, and TSMC is therefore facing an existential crisis. As you point out, it has too many eggs in the Taiwan basket and it now has to deal with a US President who has a strategic worldview in which Taiwan is an unacceptable geopolitical risk AND who knows his voters will never read your Substack post but instead cheer his decision to “bring their jobs back”. TSMC has to stop thinking about how wonderfully productive their Taiwanese engineers are and start tallying the projected cost of building more capacity in the US. Margins are going to have to go down. It’s the price of security. The bill for the so-called “silicon shield” is coming due and it will have to be paid, I’m afraid to say. The real question is how good the company is at American-style PR. How best to spin it?