Taiwan is looking at cooperating with three Eastern European countries on semiconductors, a move likely to find favour in Brussels which has been courting Taiwanese semiconductor firms to manufacture in the bloc.
Tech powerhouse Taiwan, home to companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC), has become front and centre of efforts to resolve a shortage of chips that has shut some auto production lines around the world and whose impact is now being felt in consumer electronics too. While TSMC is building a $12 billion chip fabrication plant in the U.S. state of Arizona, it has given no suggestion of interest in a similar facility in Europe, despite EU efforts
Taiwan will set up working groups with the three countries to work out how to cooperate on chips, while Taiwan will also give scholarships for technical training, Taiwan has been keen to express its gratitude to the three countries for their donations of COVID-19 vaccines, and also, for Lithuania and the Czech Republic’s support as Taiwan faced growing political pressure from China.
Taiwan also currently contributes to the developments of many Google products, including Pixel phones, smart home, and wearable devices, Chromebooks, and Chromecast. This January, Google opened a new office in New Taipei City, which is the biggest Google hardware engineering facility outside of the US. Taiwan has grown to be a critical hub for global innovation and hardware manufacturing, especially for Google.
Tina Lin, managing director of sales & operations in Google Taiwan explained why Google chooses Taiwan to develop many of their hardware products and continues investing in Taiwan every year.
Having a very solid and complete IT supply chain and strong tech talents in software and hardware integration are two major factors that make Google choose Taiwan to develop its hardware products, according to Lin.
Taiwan ODM manufacturers account for 90% of worldwide notebooks. “Our Chromebook development team can easily find related supporting ecosystem suppliers in Taiwan to work with,” she continued.
Just because of the highly concentrated IT ecosystem clusters in Taiwan, it is very easy and efficient to arrange multiple meetings with different suppliers in one day, which is rare to be seen in other countries, according to her.
In six Taiwan cities, Google already had a variety of offices. In the past five years, Google’s Taiwan workforce has grown tenfold. Lin said Taiwan talents are very excellent in software and hardware and the integration of both. “Pixel 6, developed by Google Taiwan team, has earned many good feedbacks, especially with its camera functions and many new software features, including the features for people who have hearing loss, which can show the best capability of Taiwan software and hardware talents,” she said.
Google Taiwan product teams need to cover everything from zero to 100 of the products, like Pixel 6. According to Lin, Taiwan has many project managers or product managers who can design products whenever their customers place the orders, but don’t have much training allowing PM roles to think outside the box to find problems and further design the solutions for them. However, it is the whole process of designing a product and requires a lot of imagination and creativity of a product manager to get things done.
With inputs from Digitimes
Box Item – Lin
Not many other locations in the world like Taiwan where have so many ecosystem suppliers in the IT industry and great tech talents in software and hardware integration.
