Advanced packaging technology has become a powerful tool for TSMC to grab orders for advanced chips. Now Samsung Electronics has also announced that it will strengthen its back-end packaging and testing technology. As for the top 10 makers in the packaging and testing industry, their revenue in 2021 reached US$33.7 billion. And the top-10 accounted for about 90% of the global packaging and testing industry, so the size of this market was about US$37 billion. Including back-end production of TSMC, Samsung, Intel and even Rohm, the output value of the whole industry wuld be about US$39.7 billion.

Talent shortages have been so serious in Taiwan that fresh graduates from top univeristies have been "booked up" by top companies. However, indiscriminate recuitments regardless of the new employees' experiences and career planning is actually bad, often resulting in high turnover and talent misuse.

Each country may have its own weaknesses or Achilles heels in industry development. For example, IC design is the weak spot of Japan and Korea. In the future, when it comes to designing various logic computing functions on memory chips, the lack of talent and a weak ecosystem will make it difficult for both countries to break through the past era of pure IC design.

Samsung Electronic is a global leader in the semiconductor industry. DIGITIMES Research estimates that Samsung generated US$81.96 billion in semiconductor revenue in 2021, with memory accounting for 77% of the total and the remaining US$18.77 billion from System LSI, which offers foundry services mainly for logic ICs.

Samsung Electronics, Intel and TSMC are the top three companies in the global semiconductor industry that have announced their entry into the 7nm advanced process. While the leading companies are inevitably enaged in intense competition against one another, Intel has outsouced its advanced process products to TSMC.

There is no doubt that semiconductors will be everywhere in the world in the future, and semiconductors are already a very important strategic industry for industrial countries. Taiwan, a top semiconductor-producing country in the world, has an unprecedented opportunity to upgrade its industry while facing strong competitive pressure. Other countries coveting Taiwan's industrial resources will provide at least some incentives, but in the process of bringing Taiwan's industrial strength to its fullest potential, we must also understand the various challenges we may face.

As global warming receives global attention, curbing greenhouse gas is both a responsibility and pressue for companies. This pressure, which promises to gradually become cost and risk in the future, is now an important part of a company's business strategy. TSMC's senior vice president for Europe and Asia, Lora Ho, is the chair of the company's ESG committee. Ho is a former chief financial officer and is very familiar with cost structures and business conditions, which I think is why she was appointed to this important position.

Foxconn founder Terry Kuo has said that in the future, there will be only G2 (the US and China), not G20 in the world. The ideological battle will probably force all manufacturers to take sides or lay out more diversified production ecosystems, and the labor force and potential markets in ASEAN and South Asia will become the best choice for industry players. To avoid becoming casualties in the conflict between the two superpowers, the best strategy is to create a third battlefield that the G2 needs. The current industry structure does have the opportunity to allow Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese manufacturers to find more space in emerging markets.

Of the top 100 supply chain companies in Asia, 96 of them are from Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea, and they are core surces of influence on the supply chain in Asia. However, these companies are facing the problem of low gross profit, but the problem of low gross profit differs from country to country, and the profit structure of different fields also shows the difference of competitiveness of each country, and the methods and strategies they rely on to adjust the industry structure.

Research organizations win the trust of society and industry players with their credible research. In 1985, when I first started my career in industry research, I went to Taiwan's customs every month to check the export reports of electronic products, and the statistics I compiled became a very important reference for the industry at that time.

Kyoto-based Rohm Semiconductor and Taipei-based Delta Electronics are both benchmarks in the application of renewable energy. It is a common goal of the world that net-zero emissions will be achieved by 2050, and Kazuhide Ino, managing executive director of Rohm, calls for upstream and downstream cooperation to address such issues.

Many years ago, when Tesla came to Taiwan looking for technical cooperation, and Delta Electronics was one of the key partners. Later, Delta expanded its layout to include charging piles, and Rohm has proposed solutions to improve efficiency, with the pair expanding cooperation from traditional power supplies to EV applications.

The strategic partnerships between Taiwan and Japanese companies have been heating up during the epidemic. In the past, the Japanese always prioritized the needs of Japanese companies, but with the mature development of Taiwan's supply chain, Japanese companies are not only knocking on the door, but are also sending personnel to Taiwan to serve somewhat as product managers for better communication. With such developments, Taiwan-based companies have seen concrete progress in both automotive electronics and compound semiconductors.

According to the top management of a cetain components distributor, 2022 will definitely be the year of dynamic management, which will not only be a short-term strategy, but may even become the new normal. First of all, we have to understand that a decentralized production mechanism is taking shape. In the future, the production bases in China will not be the only ones producing handsets, notebooks and servers; Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Indonesia will also be the focus of everyone's attention. Therefore who will be responsible for managing components inventory and logistics?

In 2022, geopolitics, tight supply chains, inflation, and pandemic are the four major variables affecting the international economic and trade environment. Of the four, geopolitics is the most critical, and the tight supply chain is most closely related to Taiwan's electronics industry.