The Cabinet yesterday said that the nation’s semiconductor industry is “the result of long and painstaking independent development by local companies,” rejecting claims of theft by US President Donald Trump.
“They stole our chip industry... We lost our chip industry,” Trump said again in an interview with Fox News after his visit to Beijing last week.
He also blamed the decline of the US semiconductor industry on his predecessors’ failure to impose tariffs of as much as 200 percent on semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan.
Photo: Cheng I-hwa, AFP
Executive Yuan spokeswoman Michelle Lee (李慧芝) rejected Trump’s comments at a weekly news conference, saying: “Taiwan supplies semiconductors to countries around the world.”
“It would not have achieved this level of competitiveness if it had relied on illegitimate means,” she said.
Lee added that Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君) explained to US negotiators during tariff talks that Taiwan’s semiconductor industry was the product of decades of development.
Separately yesterday, Executive Yuan Secretary-General Xavier Chang (張惇涵) said that Taiwan “did not steal chips from the world. It supplies them to the world,” when questioned by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Hung Mong-kai (洪孟楷) at the legislature in Taipei.
Chang said the technologies developed by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) were the result of three decades of refinement following a technology transfer agreement between Taiwan and Radio Corp of America (RCA).
The remarks by the Cabinet officials came a day after Taiwanese tech mogul Robert Tsao (曹興誠), founder of United Microelectronics Corp, urged the government to respond to Trump’s claims.
Tsao said Trump’s accusations could have serious implications, as they constituted a diplomatically hostile gesture and were being used to justify efforts to pressure Taiwanese chipmakers to establish production facilities in the US.
He urged the Executive Yuan, the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and TSMC to hold a news conference detailing the origins of Taiwan’s semiconductor technology, and the decades of investment and research and development that had gone into building the industry to “set the record straight.”
Tsao on social media said that Taiwan’s chipmaking expertise originated from a US$3.5 million technology transfer deal with RCA in 1976, under which ITRI acquired 7-micrometer complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor manufacturing technology.
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