Sam Kim, South Korea and Taiwan's Chip Power Rattles the US and China. Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Mar 3, 2021.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... d-worries-u-s-china
Quote:
(a) "the $400 billion semiconductor industry [worldwide], where a shortage of certain kinds of [automobile] chips * * * The technological prowess and massive investment required to produce the newest 5-nanometer chips (that’s 15,000 times slimmer than a human hair) * * *
(n) " 'South Korea and Taiwan are now primary providers of chips like OPEC countries once were of oil,' says Ahn Ki-hyun, a senior official at the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association. 'They don't collaborate like OPEC. But they do have such powers.' It's true the chip industry has no equivalent to the mighty oil cartel. Yet like a Saudi Arabia or a Russia [which do not collaborate on crude oil, either], Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co can move markets with a turn of the spigot. Samsung's decision at the start of 2019 to reduce capital spending on memory chips in a bid to bolster profits caused prices in the segment to rise after years of declines. * * *
(c) "A report published last September by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), estimated that in 2020 the U.S. accounted for just 12% of semiconductor manufacturing capacity, while Taiwan and South Korea together made up 43%.
(d) "Samsung's newest fab, in Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul, has a price tag of around $15 billion.
(e) "Its [China's] share of global manufacturing capacity now stands at 15%, three percentage points above the US, according to the BCG report
(f) "So for now, Washington and Beijing are in a similar bind: heavily reliant on the flow of chips from Taiwan and South Korea, which are allied with the US strategically but also entwined with China economically. Says Lee Kyung-mook [李允默], a professor of business management at Seoul National University: 'They may now have more power than OPEC did going forward, because at least oil producers were spread all over the world.
Note:
(a)
(i) Quotation (c) ("A report"/ supplying a link to the report) and (e) ("the BCG report"/ notice the definite article) refer to
Antonio Varas, Raj Varadarajan, Jimmy Goodrich and Falan Yinug, Government Incentives and US Competitiveness in Semiconductor Manufacturing. BCG and SIA, September 2020.
https://web-assets.bcg.com/27/cf ... turing-sep-2020.pdf
(A) The same report also appears at SIA (semiconductor Industry Association) website.
Kevin Curran, Is Taiwan a Ticking Time Bomb in the Semiconductor Supply Chain? TheDiplomat.com, Feb 27, 2021
https://thediplomat.com/2021/02/ ... uctor-supply-chain/
(B) I went through this report, which did not mention change in market shares such as these.
(ii) However, view the graphic immediately after quotation (c).
(A) Kevin Curran, Is Taiwan a Ticking Time Bomb in the Semiconductor Supply Chain? TheDiplomat.com, Feb 27, 2021
https://thediplomat.com/2021/02/ ... uctor-supply-chain/
("according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, the US share of global semiconductor manufacturing has steadily declined from 37 percent in 1990 to just 12 percent in February 2021")
(B) The graphic has a heading: "Share of Global Semiconductor Manufacturing Capacity" (among Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, China, US, Europe and "Other"/ "Data: Boston Consulting Group, Semiconductor Industry Association")
SIA website sells its research reports. So I can not find out where data underlying the graphic comes from.
(C) But it is easy to surmise that the graphic includes both logic and memory chips, if not IC design, packaging or testing (the three categories Taiwan also excels). And it is indeed the case, which show Taiwan's "semiconductor" "share" -- I am quoting the heading of the graphic -- shrank a bit since 2014 (when it peaked in Taiwan).
Overview on Taiwan Semiconductor Industry (2020 Edition). Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association (TSIA), July 3, 2020.
file:///C:/Users/WPL/Downloads/2020%20Overview%20Edited%20v01.pdf
(paragraphs 1 & 2: "This Overview on Taiwan Semiconductor Industry is a translated excerpt from an ITIS (Industrial Technology Information Services) publication, which provides an overview of Taiwan semiconductor industry in 2019. * * * ITIS is a market research project, which is supported primarily by the Taiwan government. For semiconductor portion of the project, research was conducted in Industrial Economics & Knowledge Center [(IEK); 產業經濟與趨勢研究中心 (產經中心)] of Industrial Technology Research Institute [(ITRI); 財團法人 工業技術硏究院 (工研院)] (IEK/ITRI)" )
At page 4 is "Table 1 Revenue of Taiwan IC Industry, 2019" whose rightmost column displays revenue changes between 2019 and 2018 in billions of New Taiwanese dollars: memory decreased by "20.4%."
(b) Pyeongtaek 平澤市
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyeongtaek
(a city in Gyeonggi Province 京畿道; was elevated to city status in 1986 and is home to a South Korean naval base and a large concentration of United States troops)
(i) Google Maps shows it is about 35-mile air distance south of Seoul.
(ii) Compare English spelling: Pyongyang 平壤直轄市.
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