TSMC, as a giant in the wafer foundry industry, has always attracted much attention. After Zhang Zhongmou founded TSMC, he led the development of TSMC until his second retirement in 2018, when Liu Deyin became the second chairman.
However, Taiwan media recently released news that TSMC announced without warning that Liu Deyin would retire next year and be replaced by the older president Wei Zhejia. It came a little suddenly, and maybe we wanted to turn the situation around, but it was too late!
The news of Liu Deyin's retirement had no warning before, and the handling situation was not normal. First of all, Liu Deyin's retirement was not announced by himself, but by the company, which seems to be a passive retirement.
Secondly, although Liu Deyin is about to be 70 years old, he is younger than the president Wei Zhejia who took over, which is not logical.
Based on the above two points, many ** generally believe that the news of Liu Deyin's retirement seems to have another mystery, so they have speculated that the reason behind it may be related to TSMC's investment in the United States.
On the issue of building a factory in the United States, Zhang Zhongmou has always disagreed, because there has been a profound lesson. A long time ago, TSMC built a wafer factory in the United States, but due to the high local costs, it operated for many years to maintain a loss.
Therefore, Zhang Zhongmou has never thought of investing in the United States to build factories in so many years in office. However, during Liu Deyin's tenure, he announced that he would build a factory in the United States, first investing $12 billion to build a 5nm process chip factory in the United States.
Later, the investment was further expanded to 40 billion US dollars, the process also mentioned 4nm, and another 3nm chip factory was planned.
Although TSMC went to the United States to build a factory with passive factors, it later became very active, and Liu Deyin seemed to want to do a big job in the United States. Otherwise, it will not directly increase the investment to 40 billion US dollars, and build an advanced 3nm factory.
However, Zhang Zhongmou has always disagreed with this, and has even publicly stated many times that the United States will not succeed in rebuilding semiconductor manufacturing at all. However, before this result appeared, TSMC encountered many problems in building factories in the United States.
Not only has the chip subsidy not been received so far, but it has also been subject to more restrictions, and the construction of factories in the United States has become a drag on TSMC.
Although TSMC has faced a more complex situation in recent years, it is also a test of the ability and level of the leader. For example, Huawei, which has faced crazy sanctions from superpowers in recent years, has survived under the guidance of Ren Zhengfei.
It can be said that it is very important for the leader to control the overall direction. However, Liu Deyin does not seem to have played this role.
Liu Deyin did not deal with the complex situation faced by TSMC, and the construction of a factory in the United States made TSMC very embarrassed, and now it is a dilemma, and it has stopped OEM for Chinese customers such as Huawei, making TSMC more dependent on American companies.
Now it seems that TSMC wants to turn the situation around by changing the leader, but the challenges are still very serious.
First of all, the return of Huawei's self-developed Kirin chip means that the mainland industrial chain has achieved a breakthrough, and with the continuous improvement of chip production capacity, TSMC may lose more customers, so Wei Zhejia will lead the team to the mainland market to win customers.
Second, TSMC lost the right of first refusal to purchase high-end lithography machines. Recently, ASML has said that the next generation of high-end EUV lithography machines are being packaged and sent to Intel. You know, this is an indispensable equipment for the layout of 2nm production lines.
That's not all, ASML will be able to offer a total of 10 High NA EUVs in 2024, of which 6 are Intel's. Without the priority of getting more high-end lithography machines, TSMC will not be able to lead in advanced processes as before.
Moreover, TSMC's technological leadership may not be sustainable. Because Intel has prioritized the next generation of EUVs, it will achieve mass production of the 2nm process in 2024, while TSMC can only be mass-produced in 2025 one year later.
If this situation continues, TSMC's major customers of American companies may leave one after another.
Therefore, despite the urgent layout now, let President Wei Zhejia take over as chairman, TSMC entered the "3Generation 0", but the challenges remain many. Therefore, this has also caused a lot of worries, will TSMC begin to decline because of this?
In this regard, some foreign media directly said that it is too late to lay out, and TSMC's crisis is accelerating, and it cannot be solved by changing generals. Some netizens said that 2024 may be the "first year of decline" for TSMC to turn from prosperity to decline!