Taipei-Hsinchu was the world’s 25th-largest science and technology (S&T) cluster this year, up from 27th last year, according to the Global Innovation Index 2024 released on Tuesday by the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
Each year, WIPO publishes a ranking of the top 100 clusters using patent application and scientific publication data to identify local concentrations of world-leading S&T activities.
Since 2016, the index has employed a bottom-up approach to identifying clusters.
Photo: CNA
The methodology disregards administrative or political borders and instead focuses on geographical areas that boast a high density of inventors and scientific authors, WIPO said.
As one of the three science parks in Taiwan, the Hsinchu Science Park (新竹科學園區) is home to many tech giants, including contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), which has been the country’s largest patent applicant for years.
Tokyo-Yokohama in Japan retained the title as the world’s top-performing tech hub, followed by China’s Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou, whose ranking remained unchanged.
WIPO said the top two clusters benefited from a large number of patents filed by Mitsubishi Electric Corp in Tokyo and Huawei Technologies Co (華為) in Shenzhen, China.
Beijing came in third, followed by Seoul, Shanghai-Suzhou in China, San Jose-San Francisco in the US, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto in Japan, Boston-Cambridge in the US, Nanjing, China, and San Diego, California.
The country with the most S&T clusters was China, which held 26 of the top 100 spots.
The US was second with 20.
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to remain Apple Inc’s primary chip manufacturing partner despite reports that Apple could shift some orders to Intel Corp, industry experts said yesterday. The comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary agreement following more than a year of negotiations for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, including integrated fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, remain critical to the performance of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. She said Intel and Samsung
TRANSITION: With the closure, the company would reorganize its Taiwanese unit to a sales and service-focused model, Bridgestone said Bridgestone Corp yesterday announced it would cease manufacturing operations at its tire plant in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口), affecting more than 500 workers. Bridgestone Taiwan Co (台灣普利司通) said in a statement that the decision was based on the Tokyo-based tire maker’s adjustments to its global operational strategy and long-term market development considerations. The Taiwanese unit would be reorganized as part of the closure, effective yesterday, and all related production activities would be concluded, the statement said. Under the plan, Bridgestone would continue to deepen its presence in the Taiwanese market, while transitioning to a sales and service-focused business model, it added. The Hsinchu
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has approved a capital budget of US$31.28 billion for production expansion to meet long-term development needs during the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. The company’s board meeting yesterday approved the capital appropriation plan for purposes such as the installation of advanced technology capacity and fab construction, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. At an earnings conference last month, TSMC forecast that its capital expenditure for this year would be at the higher end of the US$52 billion to US$56 billion range it forecast in January in response to robust demand for 5G, AI and
RSS