The past few months have been crazy. We’re not going to mention everything bad that has happened but we’ll just focus on the US trade ban against Huawei that has been affecting the top Chinese OEM and a number of American firms and suppliers since last year. We don’t think the Trump administration will ease up on any restriction. Huawei has started looking for alternative suppliers and technology after TSMC stopped getting orders. This was after the directive that companies that use American technology would have to seek a license from the US government.
Despite the fact that Huawei is TSMC’s No. 2 customer, TSMC made the decision to just not take orders from the company. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC) seems not worried. It’s even saying that it can fill the order gap.
TSMC is confident that sales won’t be affected. It wasn’t formally required by the US government yet to get a license for official transactions with Huawei but it simply made the decision to exclude the Chinese brand before things escalate. The TSMC chairman said HiSilicon’s (Huawei’s chipset division) orders can be replaced “in a very short time”. This means there will be no major problem but would still be “difficult for him to predict how fast it could be filled immediately”.
The Huawei chairman earlier broke his silence about the US discriminatory rule. TSMC is just one manufacturer affected but we know more will have the same challenge. The China-US problem was been affecting many businesses, industries, and even other policies around the world.
TSMC has plans to expand further in the US. If and when it becomes a reality, then maybe there will be more clients. TSMC and the US government have begun discussing subsidies for a new plant since there are notable differences in cost between the US and Taiwan.
