Silver Lake, a global private investment firm specializing in high technology companies, says Taiwan is a “victim of its own success,” citing the country’s business concentration in saturation, matured markets such as desktop personal computers, motherboards, notebooks and disk drives.
“Taiwanese companies are losing their advantage because of widespread technology, cost pressure from China and South Korea, as well as internal competition, making these businesses extremely difficult to expand beyond their current dominance,” Ken Hao, managing director of Silver Lake, said of the Taiwan economic situation during a speech at the 2008 Taiwan Venture Forum conference in Taipei yesterday.
Citing a recent World Economic Forum’s report, Hao said, Taiwan had fallen from No. 14 down to No. 17 in rank of global competitiveness because of severe brain drain and lack of intellectual property protection.
Another presenter at this year’s Taiwan Venture Forum was Colley Huang, founder and president of DigiTimes Inc, who echoed Hao’s opinion that Taiwan is at a cross roads right now, with South Korea and China quickly catching up.
As the head of a local information and communication technology (ICT) publication, Huang witnessed decades of high tech evolution in Asia and he stressed the importance the government’s role in planning a country’s core strategy, citing South Korea’s consumer electronics success, which came with a lot of help and planning from the government.
“Taiwan needs to have a similar master plan of where it wants to go, espeically at a time when Dynamic random access memory [DRAM] and liquid crystal display [LCD] industries are in disarray,” Huang said.
With careful planning and execution, Huang sees the country’s ICT industry growing easily from US$330 billion this year to US$400 next year.
Despite Silver Lake’s pessimistic assessment of the nation’s economic situation, Hao is optimistic for Taiwan because he sees the country as a potential industrial hub in Asia and primary conduit to China.
Silver Lake’s investment plans for Taiwan are three-fold.
First, it believes Taiwan’s most important competitive advantage is not based on its industries or products but rather its business leaders and workforce.
Second, it views China as more of an opportunity for Taiwan than a risk.
Finally, Silver Lake is placing its bets on those economies and companies that choose to act boldly and intelligently during the crisis will achieve substantial gains.
Hao outlined his company’s five strategies for improving investment in Taiwan: Moving up the value chain, achieving greater scale and vertical integration, greater mergers and acquisition, watching emerging markets and improving a pro-business environment.
Hao said the local workforce and the importance of trade with China were central to these five strategies.
COMPETITION: AMD, Intel and Qualcomm are unveiling new laptop and desktop parts in Las Vegas, arguing their technologies provide the best performance for AI workloads Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD), the second-biggest maker of computer processors, said its chips are to be used by Dell Technologies Inc for the first time in PCs sold to businesses. The chipmaker unveiled new processors it says would make AMD-based PCs the best at running artificial intelligence (AI) software. Dell has decided to use the chips in some of its computers aimed at business customers, AMD executives said at CES in Las Vegas on Monday. Dell’s embrace of AMD for corporate PCs — it already uses the chipmaker for consumer devices — is another blow for Intel Corp as the company
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it is teaming up with Nvidia Corp to develop a new chip for artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputers that uses architecture licensed from Arm Holdings PLC. The new product is targeting AI researchers, data scientists and students rather than the mass PC market, the company said. The announcement comes as MediaTek makes efforts to add AI capabilities to its Dimensity chips for smartphones and tablets, Genio family for the Internet of Things devices, Pentonic series of smart TVs, Kompanio line of Arm-based Chromebooks, along with the Dimensity auto platform for vehicles. MeidaTek, the world’s largest chip designer for smartphones
TECH PULL: Electronics heavyweights also attracted strong buying ahead of the CES, analysts said. Meanwhile, Asian markets were mixed amid Trump’s incoming presidency Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) shares yesterday closed at a new high in the wake of a rally among tech stocks on Wall Street on Friday, moving the TAIEX sharply higher by more than 600 points. TSMC, the most heavily weighted stock in the TAIEX, rose 4.65 percent to close at a new high of NT$1,125, boosting its market value to NT$29.17 trillion (US$888 billion) and contributing about 400 points to the TAIEX’s rise. The TAIEX ended up 639.41 points, or 2.79 percent, at 23,547.71. Turnover totaled NT$406.478 billion, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. The surge in TSMC follows a positive performance
RSS