US President Donald Trump got it wrong when he said that Taiwan had “taken about 100 percent of our chips business,” technology reporter Owen Lin (林宏文) said on Saturday.
“Taiwan creates more jobs for Americans and makes affordable, efficient chips for many US companies such as Apple, Nvidia and Broadcom, allowing their products to be marketed worldwide,” he said.
Lin made the remarks at a launch event in Taipei for the English edition of his book Chip Champion: The Triumph of TSMC and Taiwan, about the success of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) based on his close observation of the world-leading contract chipmaker since its founding in 1987.
Photo: CNA
US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick’s ambition to have Taiwanese companies manufacture half of the chips for the US market in the US would be difficult to achieve within 10 years, Lin said, citing talent and culture as two primary challenges.
In its effort to revive domestic chip manufacturing, the US “needs to collaborate with Asian allies such as Japan, South Korea and especially Taiwan,” which hold advantages in equipment, materials, memory chips and wafer foundry, he said.
While TSMC’s significance has come under the spotlight in the past few years amid rising geopolitical tensions, Lin wrote in the Chinese edition of the book that he aimed to reveal the keys to the company’s success, which had long been overlooked.
“In my view, Taiwan’s transformation into a ‘chip island’ is a testament to visionary leadership, strategic planning and relentless innovation,” he wrote in the English foreword.
Lin was joined at Saturday’s event by former TSMC deputy spokeswoman Elizabeth Sun (孫又文) and Alpha Ring International chairman Peter Kurz.
Sun, who retired six years ago from the world’s largest contract chipmaker, said she found the book entertaining and accurate in many areas, especially Lin’s attribution of TSMC’s success to government support, founder Morris Chang’s (張忠謀) leadership and the contributions of its employees.
However, she expressed hope that the media would no longer “describe the company’s hardworking employees as people who are willing to sell their liver to earn a living,” calling such portrayals “disrespectful,” as the staff work with “a sense of achievement, pride and mission.”
TSMC is “a learning organization that learns from its mistakes” to prevent them from recurring, she said.
“When problems occur, people do not point fingers at each other, but instead get to the root cause to fix it and make sure it does not happen again. That’s TSMC’s culture,” she said.
That characteristic, which Sun referred to as the “solid DNA inside TSMC,” is also detailed in Lin’s book.
The English edition, published by Good Morning Press, is the fourth language version following the original traditional Chinese edition release in 2023, and subsequent Japanese and Korean versions.
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