TSMC chairman Mark Liu noted this week that negotiations with the German authorities over the possibility of building a contract manufacturing facility in Germany are generally going well, although a number of issues remain to be resolved before the project may be given final approval. . According to some reports, TSMC aims to retain the right to make strategic decisions in running a future joint venture.
Image source: TSMC
In fact, the model for the implementation of the German TSMC project could be a joint venture under construction in western Japan, in which the Taiwanese company can keep 70% of the shares and split the rest between Sony (20%) and Sony Denso (10%). ). The willingness of the Japanese authorities to bear up to half of the costs of setting up the company will not affect the share capital structure in any way.
As previously reported, some of the European companies could become partners of TSMC in setting up a company in Germany. According to edition DigiTimesIn this case, the management of TSMC would like to retain the majority of the votes, so that the operational and strategic management of the joint venture is at its own discretion. The amount of the grant from the German authorities has not yet been determined, but will be granted in any case, otherwise TSMC’s interest in the project will fall sharply.
As announced at the end of TSMC’s Annual General Meeting, the company is considering building a second plant in Japan next to the one already under construction, and this intention arose considering the already expanded capacities of the first relative to the original version of the project. With regard to lithography, no significant advances in the Japanese direction are to be expected, here components are manufactured in 12 nm technology as well as more mature ones. In Germany, according to industry experts, TSMC will focus on the use of 28nm technology, since up to half of the products sold in Europe belong to the microcontroller segment, which simply does not require advanced lithography.
At the shareholders’ meeting, TSMC also summarized information about its companies that are being established or operated outside of Taiwan. Management is silent about the joint venture WaferTech, which has been active in the USA since 1996, only mentioning two plants under construction in Arizona that will deal with advanced lithography. The first of these will be referred to as Fab 21, while Fab 23 will be built in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. After all, the US authorities’ attention to the activities of chipmakers in China will not affect the operation of the Nanjing Fab 16 plant, which is already operational.
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