I was under the impression that their work shortage was a result of American workers having insufficient education and required skills. They offered salaries in Arizona are significantly above minimum wage.
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Apple Chipmaker TSMC to Receive $6.6 Billion Grant to Step Up Production in the U.S.
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EU based companies when it comes to their foreign behavior is as fishy. But that is another debate.
The issue at hand is tangent.
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I think that Apple is seeing firsthand the risk of having all your eggs in one basket.
It's not a lie per se depending on what you mean by "their". The island was annexed in 1683 by the Qing dynasty of China and ceded to the Empire of Japan in 1895. The Republic of China, which had overthrown the Qing in 1912, took control following the surrender of Japan in 1945. Japan renounced sovereignty over Taiwan in 1952(Wikipedia).
The CCP (PRC) had nothing to do with anything until 1949.
In theory chipmaking should be one industry America is competitive in.
Manufacturing in the USA is typically either highly automated, highly skilled, or some combination of both. Or stuff that’s just too big to be shipped overseas.
What I want to know is the source of the silicon wafers, I’ve heard that those come from mainland China mostly, so if the deal is about national security then we would need the whole supply chain in friendly countries.
More than half of the world's silicon wafers are manufactured in Japan (followed with some distance by Germany and Taiwan). A US company (Wafer Pro) with facilities in Japan and the US is one of the market leaders.
Ridiculous. The AZ plant isnt even online yet and they're having lots of problems finding qualified staff.
Not just smartphones. TSMC makes a humongous percentage of the worlds fastest chips.
I’m confused. Isn’t that what they are doing?
Sounds like an educational opportunity
It mean everything, because doing nothing but talk and nothing happens. Allocate funding and break ground and things change.
For years people bashed Apple for manufacturing overseas, they work to bring manufacturing back and a new complaint comes v
Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking. You have to make sure everything’s destroyed before they even get on the beach. It would be great if China went democratic and the threat of invasion became a bad distant memory, but that wish seems unrealistic at the moment.
The earthquake was in east Taiwan, nowhere near TSMC factories which were in west Taiwan. They're also opening up factories in Japan, which seemed to be going much more smoothly. They're only opening up factories in the US because of huge subsidies, otherwise there is literally no reason to.
Don't know where you heard that. In discussing TSMC's raw material supply chain, they said "The most important raw material used in our production is silicon wafers, which is the basic raw material from which integrated circuits are made. The principal suppliers for our wafers are Formosa SUMCO Technology Corporation of Taiwan, GlobalWafers of Taiwan, Shin-Etsu Handotai of Japan, Siltronic AG of Germany, and SUMCO Corporation of Japan."
No one should be "dependent" on others for their daily life, but the modern world relies on specialization and globalization.
Actually, importing has lead to the greatest economic growth in all of history. The steam engine, which allows for rapid shipment of goods on large ships, combined with more free economic trade and lower taxation has created wealth at double digit rates over the past 100 years.
A secluded isolated society could exist a century ago, surviving on only locally produced fruits and vegetables, and only using items which its society specializes in the production of. And you can still live like that today. The Amish do it.
But in the modern world, specialization and globalization allow us access to all sorts of higher quality products. Japanese (and now Korean) cars are among the most reliable. The French produce the best wines. Russian caviar. Swiss watches. South American and African coffee and chocolate. And with electronics, there have been decades of specialization, research, and industry throughout Asia (ever wonder why every camera company is Japanese? It's not because Americans don't like taking photos).
I don't know where this fear of the Chinese comes from that I see more and more frequently from Americans, but the simple truth is China produces more engineers in one year than exist in all of America. And there are similar stories in other Asian countries. The Chinese are skilled at producing and manufacturing many products, and I appreciate them for it. Producing electronic goods is something they have a competitive advantage at. That's simply a fact.
History tells us that protectionism and a controlled reordering of the marketplace is inefficient. Forcing America to try to compete in the computer chip market is probably not going to work, and anyway it's much better to play to America's strengths like software and programming (with the exception of Huawei, while Asia produces almost every computer hardware component, they have yet to produce viable software to run it, but Americans dominate this field).
A far better idea would be to use these billions to do something else like try to make the American car a more competitive product, as America ruled the car market just a few decades ago. It could do so again. It wouldn't be easy, but it's much more likely to happen than America becoming a top computer chip maker which is pure fantasy.
There's a lot of misinformation about Taiwan and China (and assumptions about the differences between these peoples) in this thread. For those that have emotional feelings about chip production (such as it's "good" to produce chips in the USA and "bad" to do so in China), ask yourself what is the difference between Foxconn and TMSC as producers ?
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A secluded society was nigh impossible even a century ago. Adam Smith was inspired to write “The Wealth of Nations” seeing goods smuggled in.
A modern life requires global trade, yes.
My friends Kia disagrees. Though Toyota and Honda are the gold standard of reliability.
A sticking point here:
Those economies became that way through protectionist systems. Japan and South Korea especially have very protectionist attitudes towards their companies.
While the Chinese people are extremely talented and competitive, the CCP has explicitly stated they wish to change the international system. And have, multiple times, acted aggressively towards their neighbors.
At the very least, this should raise concern, especially when trying to uphold free trade across the globe.
For pure merchantilism, yes.
But being protectionist of certain industries has worked out very well for the economies of Southeast Asian countries, and European countries such as Germany. Even in the United States, we are extremely protectionist of our agricultural economy.
Being protectionist in specific industries has worked well for many countries.
At the very least, in my opinion, it’s worth a shot.
There are countless talented and intelligent people in untapped areas in the United States, especially in economically depressed areas such as the Rust Belt, which historically has been strong in manufacturing and still has significant (though smaller) manufacturing today.
The absolute wrong thing to do would be to say “it will never work” and do nothing.
There are still many electronics produced in America. Texas Instruments readily comes to mind.
The fact that cutting edge cpu fabrication is now only available from TSMC in Taiwan, and China makes incredible amounts of circuit boards, doesn’t mean that the US can never be competitive.
The US can even lean into our strengths with highly automated manufacturing processes to keep costs down, or even to manually electronics in friendly countries like Mexico (which we have done for a long time!) to shorten supply chains and gain efficiency there.
Until GM, Ford, and Stellantis stop hiring clowns for management, that ain’t gonna happen.
It’s a case of terrible management. Not ability. Toyotas and Hondas built in America are far far better than Chinese Buicks, Canadian Chevrolets, and Mexican Fords.
One is in a country that wishes to upset the international order and is state owned by law, and has an explicit goal of taking the other by force if necessary, and the other is in a country which doesn’t want to live under the first.
And failure to plan for the worst case scenario is foolish, as we saw when a certain person dismissed the contingency plans for a potential global pandemic right before a global pandemic.
And I’m perfectly content with being wrong. China will probably never try to take Taiwan by force, and the U.S. may never become a chip making powerhouse. But I’d rather be paranoid and wrong than unprepared.
Not a fear of the Chinese It’s a the CCP specifically, and precisely because they have a very different set of values. A bully mindset with complete disregard for human (or any other other for that matter) life, is not a power one wants to live under.
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Wow!
A good bit I agreed with (though half of the points made were mutually exclusive with the other half) until I read that bit of propaganda.
But Please! Guys, if you want to be taken seriously stop using the Fox News malapropism "CCP". There is no such entity as the "CCP". The Chinese government is the Communist Party of China (CPC) but even correctly calling it that just signals that you have never been to China or Taiwan and just form your opinions based on western propaganda and American teevee.
Evoking the image of an old boomer yelling about his ChiComs when the reality, as people like Jim Rogers have pointed out for years, is that China is far more capitalist than the USA, is mega cringe.
In fact, my biggest critique of China (as well as that of most Taiwanese dissidents* I have talked to) is its unbridled capitalism, which does indeed remove morality from economic decisions, particularly without a balancing religious force (which is waning throughout the world, even more so in the west). But of course if one misidentifies the problem as "communism" then it's impossible to make headway against a capitalist competitor.
* I say Taiwanese dissendents in the sense that they are Taiwanese who oppose reunification. Most Americans are unaware that Chinese and Taiwanese reunification is probably inevitable (and will never be done through some weird Red Dawn conspiracy type invasion as the two peoples do not hate each other). Most Americans also do not know that the leading Taiwanese presidential candidate 1 month before the 2024 election was pro-unification (he lost the election).