The fall of the West accelerates
Taiwanese companies are leading China’s state-sponsored drive to build domestic semiconductor manufacturing. In November,
, chairman of the integrated circuit (IC) division of China’s Semiconductor Industry Association told a conference: “A noteworthy phenomenon is that the proportion of domestic-funded enterprises’ revenue has dropped significantly from 2016 to 2020, from 44.0% to 27.7%, while the proportion of foreign-funded enterprises has risen from 49.1% to 61.3%,” led by Taiwanese chip fabricators.
Taiwan’s chip producers want to maintain their leadership in China’s domestic chip fabrication and will build their own chip-making equipment to prevent US sanctions.
Tokyo Electron, Japan’s largest equipment maker, increased its China sales from 50 billion yen ($441 million) in 2015 to 400 billion yen this year.
The US share of world semiconductor manufacturing has shrunk from an absolute monopoly in the 1960s to just 12% today, and only in mature nodes.