Warum erlitt Japans Halbleiterindustrie, einst die beste der Welt, eine so vernichtende Niederlage gegen TSMC? „Das Tempo der Geschäfte ist in Taiwan völlig unterschiedlich, da man dort mit weniger als der Hälfte der Investitionszeit und -kosten arbeitet wie japanische Unternehmen.“
https://president.jp/articles/-/114368
23 Kommentare
Japanese conglomerates are too large with no true focus to excel in.
Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu have too many side businesses like home furniture, trains, energy, elevators etc.
The nail in the coffin was Toshiba shoving flash memory into the back burner and focusing on their turbines for nuclear power business.
TSMC does nothing except manufacture CPUs. So they put all their resources and r and d efforts in it.
Taiwan would have never become a semiconductor superpower without Japanese manufactures of seminconductor manucfuring equipment. They essentially sold the secret sauce to a country with an equally well-educated population but lower wages.
If it weren’t for the US-China chip war and the current AI boom, the chip industry would just be an ordinary sector. Ten years ago, who cared about the chip industry?
I know someone who worked for Renesas, one of Japan biggest chip maker and this is the most black and useless company I ever heard of, no innovation, no incentive no AI investment, employees are crushed under extremely ineffficient management…
So for me it’s the traditional Japanese work culture that is killing this sector.. it requires too much fast innovation with genius people at the helm. It doesn’t work that way in Japan unfortunately
It’s a matter of delegation, devolving power and having plans with long term goals. A lot of this is absent as some companies simply plan day to day with concepts that haven’t changed.
It’s why automakers didn’t bother with EVs because their business model was set in stone already and the company prepared to manage from the top.
You see it yourself, company president often involves themselves in day to day operations of even the smallest situations. Managers lack agency and autonomy.
I was a single employee at a company with 5,000 employees, nobody basically. Had a manager that didn’t like me, reported it up, no basis to dislike me but he didn’t. Yet I became a topic for the president for about six weeks. A president of a large company of 5,000 spending six weeks focused on a single employee. They had meetings to discuss me.
Japan must regain its leadership in the field of advanced semiconductors, because Taiwan will sooner or later fall under Chinese dominance.
In other words: what’s killing Japanese work culture is Japanese work culture itself.
I feel a sense of sadness for Japan. It is not because Japanese semiconductor companies are inferior to TSMC, but because almost everyone in East Asia knows that Japan’s semiconductor industry was once highly advanced; however, it suffered a severe blow as a result of the ‘chip war’ instigated by the United States, leading to a mass exodus of talent to South Korea and Taiwan, whilst orders were also snatched away by those two regions.
This is history that has already unfolded; the problem is that the Japanese today do not even dare to speak of this period.
US in the past imposed tariff to JP semiconductors also Taiwan and US companies stole and improving the tech, pretty much ending JP semiconductors industry.
The title is quite misleading, though I guess that’s expected of President.jp articles. Tsmc has never been Japan’s bane, and if anything, they were big beneficiaries of TSMC expansion in the island.
Simply put, they have never been defeated by Taiwan. They have been defeated by Korea and US. Japanese semiconductor industry’s crown jewel has always been the memory chips. They took that market from the Americans, and lost it back to Americans alongside Koreans. Taiwanese and European memory makers went down alongside the Japanese too, and it just shows how cut throat the segment is.
There have been microprocessor and ASIC efforts as well, following their great success in the memory market, but they were never really in a position to directly challenge the x86 hegemony or dominant RISC based products based on the likes of POWER. There were some notable projects based on other ISAs like SPARC64 by Fujitsu, and they are still a very noteworthy designer of ARM chips, but they never lost the market to Taiwan, as Taiwanese are the ones who created and perfected the foundry business, and benefitted from the fabless boom that followed, which Japan was never in a commanding position to begin with.
They still have a dominant image sensor and processor industry as well as notable memory businesses as well as micro controllers and power semis, but none of which are experiencing „crushing defeat“ against TSMC. Some of it are experiencing tough international competition and eroding market share, but that is not from Taiwan either.
If anything, that expression (crushing defeat against TSMC) better suits the like of Samsung, who were once on par or even slightly ahead of TSMC, Intel, who were at least a generation ahead of any other IDMs or foundries until 10nm and GF, who just gave up on sub 14nm all together.
If they want to talk about „defeat“ against Taiwan, they should first come up on the field. You can’t defeat someone who’s not even born. Rapids is headed towards a very obvious beat down, but that’s another story.
DC wants to have key industry in Taiwan to help justify its military and economic investment in the island, same with S. Korea?
Is this a serious question that needed experts to weigh in or is it just the Japanese not having any clue how terrible their work culture is for efficiency and customer value?
Uncle Sam cracked down on Japanese innovation. Toshiba, NEC, Hitachi used to be very prominent into semis and memory. Geopolitics got involved just like US clamping down on China now.
Difference with China and Japan is one is sovereign and the other is a vassal state.
Isn’t Japanese companies run by consensus and hierarchy the order of day?
That alone will place them at competitive disadvantage.
It goes back to US sanctioning Japan in the 90s
Perils of capitalism. Japan used to provide cheap alternatives in 1980s then US curb them. Afterwards all the manufacturing went to Taiwan/China, Korea and Vietnam. Korea is also major chip manufacturer.
Operational conductivity is what held it back. The quality of Japanese products was never in question, just the manufacturing process is a holdover from the 1970’s, still holding onto that bubble boom way of doings things.
Cost being the major factor. First, Japan manufacturing replaces the US, then Korea replaces Japan, then China replaces Korea.
Also, technology transfer or “stealing” to Korea and China did not help a bit.
Old men in suits ruin everything.
I work in the semiconductor business in Japan dealing with manufacturing, engineers in factories all over Japan. I offer them solutions for production issues that they encounter and cannot solve. I offer them solutions, new tools, taylor made for their needs. better technology good service and I mostly or often I get the response „I’m an engineer I would love to use your tools I would love to use your machines but management don’t have the budget“. Also it takes a long time to evaluate the tools to make sure they work properly under the same condition they have in the mass production. They don’t have dedicated machines for evaluation they don’t have dedicated machines for r&d, prototyping, or manufacturing various lower volume products they might have to produce so they use the mass production auto machines which are designed to produce millions of units and they have a lot of troubles doing that. And I’m talking about all the major companies like Mitsubishi, Fuji, Sony… you name them and I work with them and it’s always the same situation it’s frustrating.
So yeah no surprises here they’re still very old fashioned old school impossible to innovate in this environment.
Plaza accord and semiconductor agreement from you know who was a major blow, followed by a bunch of things
The island where the Government has massive investments in the silicon shield .
They prob stopped giving a fuck after the Plaza Accords.