The decline of the Japanese chip industry has the potential to bring a wealth of new technology and many new outsourcing contracts to Taiwan, the US-Taiwan Business Council has said in a report.
In its quarterly Taiwan Semiconductor Report released this week, the council also examines the dispute over the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台).
“Japanese chipmakers have fallen so far behind their global rivals, and the pace of deterioration has increased so much, that soon there may not be a question of how much to outsource — they will not have any other choices left,” the report said.
“How much outsourcing might be on the way to Taiwan companies? The potential appears huge” the report said.
Taiwan’s chip executives expect the coming wave of outsourcing from Japan to cover high-end and low-end chip fabrication, as well as in chip assembly, but nobody is able to give any estimates for how much or how fast it might come, the report said.
“Japan’s chip industry is falling apart — after years of decline, the end is near,” it said.
Japanese companies have been slow to outsource chip production to Taiwan, but they will have to do more of that in the future, the report said.
It also says that because of the dispute over the Diaoyutais, which are referred to in Japan as the Senkakus, Japan is replacing Taiwan as the most likely focus of a Chinese attack in the Asia-Pacific region.
“While they [the islands] appear to be just a group of rocks in the middle of nowhere, with population zero, they represent a perceived national humiliation that unites ethnic Chinese from the PRC [People’s Republic of China], Hong Kong and Taiwan against Japan,” the report said.
“The emotional pull of the islands is so powerful that even if Beijing wanted to avoid a conflict with Japan over them, it might have a hard time doing so,” it said.
Where once rival political systems separated China and Taiwan, the general goal to become rich and powerful unites them today in business and cultural affairs, the report said.
“The old fears — that Taiwan could become a target if problems in China prompted it to seek a conflict to drum up patriotism — have faded, as Chinese nationalists now have a new focus and pariah in the Diaoyu[tai] Islands and Japan,” the report said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods