There is no need for one country to control the semiconductor industry, which is complex and needs a division of labor, Taiwan’s top technology official said yesterday after US President Donald Trump criticized the nation’s chip dominance.
Trump repeated claims on Thursday that Taiwan had taken the industry and he wanted it back in the US, saying he aimed to restore US chip manufacturing.
National Science and Technology Council Minister Wu Cheng-wen (吳誠文) did not name Trump in a Facebook post, but referred to President William Lai’s (賴清德) comments on Friday that Taiwan would be a reliable partner in the democratic supply chain of the global semiconductor industry.
Photo: Bloomberg
Wu wrote that Taiwan has in the past few years often been asked how its semiconductor industry had become an internationally acclaimed benchmark.
“How did we achieve this? Obviously, we did not gain this for no reason from other countries,” he said, recounting how the government developed the sector from the 1970s, including helping found Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) in 1987, now the world’s largest contract chipmaker.
“This shows that Taiwan has invested half a century of hard work to achieve today’s success, and it certainly wasn’t something taken easily from other countries,” Wu said.
Each country has its own specialty for chips, from Japan making chemicals and equipment to the US, which is “second to none” on the design and application of innovative systems, he said.
“The semiconductor industry is highly complex and requires precise specialization and division of labor. Given that each country has its own unique industrial strengths, there is no need for a single nation to fully control or monopolize all technologies globally,” he said.
Taiwan is willing to be used as a base to assist “friendly democratic countries” in playing their appropriate roles in the semiconductor supply chain, he added.
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