The Fair Trade Commission’s fine on Qualcomm Inc is likely to have substantial impact on Taiwanese brands and semiconductor companies in the long term, Minister of Economic Affairs Shen Jong-chin (沈榮津) told lawmakers yesterday.
“Qualcomm has already placed orders for Taiwan’s semiconductor firms for next year and 2019, so we forecast the impact might emerge two years from now, in the worst-case scenario,” Shen said during a question-and-answer session at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee.
The commission on Oct. 11 fined Qualcomm NT$23.4 billion (US$775.5 million), saying that the world’s largest smartphone chip supplier had unfairly manipulated prices and hurt market competition.
The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) on Wednesday last week confirmed that it received a verbal notice from Qualcomm that the US firm was stopping talks on collaboration on 5G technology.
The ministry has been vocal about its opposition to the fine on Qualcomm.
The ministry respects the commission’s ruling, but it is worried that the incident will hurt Taiwan’s industry development, Shen said.
“From the ministry’s perspective, industrial development should be prioritized ahead of fair trade, as it involves national interests,” Shen said.
Under the worst-case scenario predicted by the ministry, Qualcomm might allocate more orders to foreign semiconductor firms and reduce its orders to Taiwan’s foundry, chip testing and packing services providers after next year, he said.
The combined orders Qualcomm placed on Taiwan’s foundry, chip testing and packaging service providers totaled NT$155.7 billion last year, ministry data showed.
Such a reduction in orders might consequently affect the supplies of Qualcomm’s chips and modules to Taiwan’s smartphone vendors, he said.
More than 80 percent of Asustek Computer Inc’s (華碩) ZenFone series used Qualcomm’s chips last year, according to Asustek.
HTC Corp (宏達電) has also used Qualcomm’s processors for its flagship smartphones over the past few years.
Shen said Taiwan’s networking system providers had been looking forward to cooperating with Qualcomm in building 5G small-cell base stations through ITRI’s planned collaboration with the US company.
“Taiwan’s networking system providers need Qualcomm’s advanced technologies for 5G development,” Shen said.
ITRI has approached Taiwanese IC designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) as a back-up plan for 5G technology development, but it has not given up on talking Qualcomm into resuming its collaboration, the minister said.
In related news, Shen confirmed that Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology principal Tai Chein (戴謙) is one of the three candidates for the chairmanship of CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油).
Shen said the ministry will make a decision regarding the appointment within two weeks, as the state-run company needs to have a leader to guide it as soon as possible.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
CHINA RIVAL: The chips are positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell products and would enable clusters connecting more than 100,000 chips Moore Threads Technology Co (摩爾線程) introduced a new generation of chips aimed at reducing artificial intelligence (AI) developers’ dependence on Nvidia Corp’s hardware, just weeks after pulling off one of the most successful Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) in years. “These products will significantly enhance world-class computing speed and capabilities that all developers aspire to,” Moore Threads CEO Zhang Jianzhong (張建中), a former Nvidia executive, said on Saturday at a company event in Beijing. “We hope they can meet the needs of more developers in China so that you no longer need to wait for advanced foreign products.” Chinese chipmakers are in
RSS