| Summary/Abstract |
This article focuses on Taiwan’s TSMC, which occupies a choke point in the logic semiconductor supply chain, and discusses the impact of the US-China high-tech hegemony conflict on companies in East Asia. Since its inception, TSMC has built a superior competitive advantage through close interaction with its US customers. The U.S. government, noticing that China’s Huawei outsourced manufacturing of its chips to TSMC, took advantage of US control of the upstream (manufacturing facilities) and downstream (customers) that underpin the TSMC business base to interrupt TSMC’s business with Huawei through export controls and thereby contain Huawei. On the other hand, against the backdrop of high-tech competition between the US and China and the shortage of semiconductors after the Novel Coronavirus pandemic, major countries are now competing to attract TSMC. This is forcing a change in TSMC’s Taiwan- centered production system, which is the source of TSMC’s efficiency.
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