Taiwan, every mention
96 scenes · ← back to Taiwan
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 48Ben Gilbert 19Ben Thompson 13Morris Chang 9John Bathgate 4Steve Ballmer 2Anthony Gonzalez 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Taiwan comes up
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 2:10:56 Steve Ballmer I flew to Taiwan and we were looking at buying HTC.
- ▶ 2:11:07 Steve Ballmer I finally just decided I, Terry Meyers and I, we had three, four trips to Taiwan to talk to Peter, look at the organization.
Rolex (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:39:42 David Rosenthal You know, nothing on my wrist until the Apple Watch, and then when the Apple Watch came out, I've worn that every day since, until we went to Taiwan, and we were like, well, we should do a little, little Easter egg, and we broke out the…
- ▶ 2:47:27 Ben Gilbert He lived the quartz crisis firsthand and was flying around to Geneva and Taiwan and Japan and reporting on it live.
- ▶ 2:48:08 David Rosenthal The analogy here is like TSMC in Taiwan.
- ▶ 2:48:46 Ben Gilbert In many ways, it actually, the Taiwan metaphor totally extends.
- ▶ 2:58:47 Ben Gilbert So Hong Kong becomes the powerhouse for inexpensive manufacturing of all of this, along with Taiwan, South Korea, and mainland China.
TSMC founder Morris Chang · Acquired
- ▶ 1:39 Ben Gilbert We flew to Taiwan for a forty-eight-hour whirlwind where we spent some time at TSMC's headquarters in Hinshu Science Park, uh, where many of TSMC's fabs are located.
- ▶ 10:30 Morris Chang In Taiwan, usually the chairman is the top man anyway, even though, uh, uh, uh, CEO is another person.
- ▶ 54:28 Morris Chang He was going to be here for only a year at first, but he winded up, he ended up staying, spending six, seven years in Taiwan.
- ▶ 1:08:20 Morris Chang Yeah, and a pretty big company, and in fact, uh, Terry Gao, uh, is reputed to be one of the richest, uh, men in Taiwan.
- ▶ 1:22:56 Morris Chang Ordinary Taiwan TSMC stock to ADRs.
- ▶ 1:24:05 Morris Chang Back then, but, ah, a, a modest dividend, and we could cut that dividend, and, ah, then we, we also could, could sell stock, you know, new stock offering, either in, in Taiwan or in the U.S.
- ▶ 1:44:39 Morris Chang Before this Apple thing, Apple and we, before Apple became our customer, I knew a lot of Intel's customers in Taiwan.
- ▶ 1:46:21 Morris Chang Intel, I mean, I, I, I said I knew a lot of, uh, customers of, uh, Intel's here in Taiwan.
- ▶ 2:01:21 Morris Chang I mean, they thought, uh, we're, we're still a small Taiwan, uh, backward place, you know.
- ▶ 2:01:30 Morris Chang It's a Taiwan company, and they are going to pick IBM.
- ▶ 2:01:53 Ben Gilbert And UMC at that point in time was, was it fair to call it a peer of TSMC here in Taiwan in terms of volume and size?
- ▶ 2:22:47 David Rosenthal At the time, they didn't have the capabilities, certainly not TSMC, and, and it didn't exist in Taiwan to be able to design chips and products.
- ▶ 2:27:48 David Rosenthal We talked about this on our original TSMC episode that, you know, even if you wanted to, you couldn't airlift TSMC and this capability out of Taiwan and recreate it somewhere else.
- ▶ 2:29:40 Ben Gilbert Uh, not to mention, David, both of our flight experiences kind of felt like, oh, there's, these are a bunch of chip design, uh, fabulous companies that are making the pilgrimage over to, uh, Taiwan to meet with people in this ecosystem.
- ▶ 2:30:08 Ben Gilbert Which does raise the point of this, uh, Arizona fab and the sort of outside of Taiwan fabs.
- ▶ 2:30:21 Ben Gilbert It's not leveraging this really close geographic ecosystem that they have in, I believe there's three science parks in Taiwan.
- ▶ 2:46:58 David Rosenthal So glad we did this, went to Taiwan, got to see this in person, got to spend this special time with Dr.
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 5:20 David Rosenthal Which is the highest civilian honor that anyone in Taiwan can hold.
- ▶ 5:25 David Rosenthal So he's like a knight of Taiwan.
- ▶ 44:54 David Rosenthal So how do we go from this dude in his mid fifties, former rising star now washed up from that to he's in Taiwan.
- ▶ 45:15 David Rosenthal So back when Morris was at TI, when he was running the semiconductor business there, he went over to Taiwan a couple times to talk about building a manufacturing plant there.
- ▶ 45:28 David Rosenthal TI would own and build the manufacturing plant, but outsource to Taiwan.
- ▶ 45:34 David Rosenthal Anyway, he had no connection to Taiwan.
- ▶ 45:37 David Rosenthal He's not from Taiwan.
- ▶ 45:38 David Rosenthal People are like, oh, Morris, you went back to Taiwan.
- ▶ 45:41 David Rosenthal He didn't go back to Taiwan.
- ▶ 45:42 Ben Gilbert He talks about how Taiwan was a strange land to him when he first got there.
- ▶ 46:03 David Rosenthal So anyway, so he had met a bunch of government officials in Taiwan when he was talking about building this plant over there.
- ▶ 46:15 David Rosenthal Taiwan at this point, it's a manufacturing nation.
- ▶ 46:31 Ben Gilbert We had little strength in sales and marketing, and this is of course referring to Taiwan as a nation, and we had almost no strength in intellectual property.
- ▶ 46:38 Ben Gilbert The only possible strength in Taiwan that we had was
- ▶ 46:54 David Rosenthal Yeah, I mean, that was Taiwan at the time, so to give you a sense, the average gross margin of a Taiwanese company at this point in time in the mid-eighties is four to five percent.
- ▶ 47:10 David Rosenthal You know, if you were, uh, grew up around when Ben and I did, you know, sort of born in the eighties in the U S you see made in Taiwan on everything, like, you know, Barbie dolls, toys, clothes, everything was made in Taiwan.
- ▶ 47:21 David Rosenthal You know, now it's made in China or made in Vietnam or elsewhere, but made in Taiwan was super low end physical manufacturing stuff.
- ▶ 48:20 David Rosenthal An initiative called the Industrial Technology Research Institute, or ITRI, and the goal was for it to become like the Bell Labs of Taiwan to do some tech transfers from the U.S. and elsewhere and home grow some real technology businesses…
- ▶ 48:41 Ben Gilbert And so Morris wasn't going to Taiwan to start TSMC.
- ▶ 48:54 David Rosenthal He's known as the father of Taiwan's economic miracle, literally because of this.
- ▶ 49:16 David Rosenthal He's gonna go over to Taiwan and run like a research park there, like, what?
- ▶ 50:20 David Rosenthal And he's going to live in Taiwan, where, you know, corporate magnets have five percent gross margins.
- ▶ 50:59 David Rosenthal All of the employees of E-tree are people in government jobs in Taiwan, and government jobs
- ▶ 51:06 David Rosenthal Um, not even, you know, in like a democracy because Taiwan is like, it's under martial law.
- ▶ 52:27 David Rosenthal By the time it actually gets onto the ground in Taiwan, they're two and a half generations behind the leading producers.
- ▶ 54:22 David Rosenthal I want you Morris Chang to start a new semiconductor company here in Taiwan.
- ▶ 54:37 David Rosenthal I'm going to say in a minute, but again, remember this is not a democracy in Taiwan at this time.
- ▶ 1:01:37 David Rosenthal And then literally the premier of Taiwan, like the head of the government, has to then go around to all the other business leaders in Taiwan and like strong arm them into investing the rest of it.
- ▶ 1:22:30 David Rosenthal Other options, because almost all their manufacturing is in Taiwan.
- ▶ 1:45:04 David Rosenthal So since the first IPO in Taiwan in 1994, TSMC has had compound annual revenue growth of 17.4% for 27 years.
- ▶ 1:45:27 David Rosenthal So it was four billion market cap at the Taiwan IPO in 1994.
- ▶ 1:59:12 Ben Gilbert Capitalize geopolitics discussion, because I was thinking about the other way that TSMC could fail would be that China decides the moment is right to go and assert our force and take over Taiwan.
- ▶ 1:59:24 David Rosenthal Depending on how you see it, either annex Taiwan or assert its, as always claimed, sovereignty in Taiwan.
- ▶ 2:02:27 Ben Gilbert I think it makes sense based on the ecosystem that we've created in Taiwan to keep operating it here.
- ▶ 2:03:00 David Rosenthal I mean, this is a scary, scary future to contemplate, and I hope to God it doesn't happen, but really the thought exercise here is what would happen if China annexes Taiwan tomorrow.
- ▶ 2:03:40 David Rosenthal Would it be possible to airlift the process power that TSMC has physically out of Taiwan to somewhere else?
- ▶ 2:07:12 Ben Gilbert It later began designing the chips itself, eventually outsourced production to TSMC, a contract manufacturer in Taiwan that had been founded, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
- ▶ 2:16:33 David Rosenthal Look, we could grade, like, I don't know, Taiwan's decision to do this.
- ▶ 2:20:06 David Rosenthal Other than that, I don't know that there is a stronger moat that any company has in the entire world than TSMC.
IKEA (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:04:35 David Rosenthal In 1994, they enter Taiwan.
Costco (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:34:23 David Rosenthal That they could clear across all the countries that they were operating in and planning to operate in, and so Kirkland Signature, like, that works in Japan, that works in Korea, that works in Taiwan.
- ▶ 1:38:17 David Rosenthal So first they go to the UK, then they go to Korea, to Taiwan, to Japan, ultimately China, which is now a big initiative for them.
Nike (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:43:08 David Rosenthal So Phil and a bunch of the management team starts flying around Asia, they go to Taiwan, they go to South Korea, ultimately they go to China, they go to Indonesia, they go to Vietnam.
- ▶ 1:43:22 David Rosenthal And at first it's primarily Taiwan and then South Korea that they go to.
Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:28 Ben Gilbert Started as some guy in Taiwan with no access.
- ▶ 23:28 Ben Thompson You know, I built a sort of distributed presentation system for a group of schools here.
- ▶ 23:34 Ben Thompson So there was like some sort of like tech angle per se, but really I was just like an English teacher from Taiwan.
- ▶ 27:22 Ben Thompson And after that trip is when I did start Stratechery, I wanted to figure out a way to get back to Taiwan at some point.
- ▶ 27:29 Ben Thompson My wife's from Taiwan.
- ▶ 43:54 Ben Thompson You know, I kind of want to go back to Taiwan.
- ▶ 44:03 Ben Thompson He did end up leaving shortly after he's like, no, go live in Taiwan.
- ▶ 45:20 Ben Thompson So I, as soon as I got the job, we moved back to Taiwan and you weren't supposed to have a second job for sort of obvious reasons.
- ▶ 49:08 Ben Thompson And so I'm there, I've given up this six figure job living in Taiwan, business school debt, and an idea that I thought could work, but did not seem to be working very well.
- ▶ 49:21 Ben Thompson I mean, I stopped paying all my credit cards because especially back then, Taiwan was very cash centric.
- ▶ 1:38:24 Ben Thompson Place is Taiwan and that has geopolitical risk.
- ▶ 1:38:48 Ben Thompson But I think you do have to sort of double down on Taiwan and roll the dice that nothing happens.
- ▶ 1:40:17 Ben Thompson You know, that's something that would be beneficial, but at the end of the day, TSMC is Taiwan, and that's going to always be the biggest risk, and I'm not sure there's really much they can do about that.
- ▶ 1:53:57 Ben Thompson Dude in Taiwan, giving his opinions about apple that worked for me.
- ▶ 1:54:20 Ben Gilbert Alright, so listeners, click the link in the show notes, go experience the Stratechery cinematic universe, not just a guy in Taiwan giving his opinion on Apple.
Qualcomm · Acquired
- ▶ 2:14:29 Ben Gilbert I mean, we didn't talk about this, but like China, South Korea, EU, Taiwan, all these companies, all these nations have sued or restricted.
From NFL to Startup COO to Congressman Regulating Crypto (with Rep. Anthony Gonzalez) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:42:41 Anthony Gonzalez And by the way, like, if China moves on Taiwan, that's a big problem for us, especially if we have a national security issue.
Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006) · Acquired
- ▶ 8:23 David Rosenthal But we start not in Silicon Valley, but in Taiwan?
- ▶ 8:28 David Rosenthal Yes, in the southern part of the island of Taiwan, with the birth of Zhen Sun Huang.
- ▶ 48:45 David Rosenthal I don't know if they're using, um, United or, or one of the, one of the other foundries in Taiwan, not TSMC.
- ▶ 1:02:07 David Rosenthal Jensen writes a letter to more legal, a physical letter addresses it to Morris Chang in Taiwan.
- ▶ 1:02:28 David Rosenthal He reads it in Taiwan.
SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:23:31 David Rosenthal They eventually add the Philippines, Taiwan, and China, and it's active in all of those places today.
Complexity Investing & Semiconductors with NZS Capital (Extended Cut) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:20:12 John Bathgate Yeah, even on TSMC's last earnings call, someone asked them, like, what they thought about Taiwan's sovereignty, and I'm just like, what a world we live in that, like, that's an open question that an analyst can ask on an earnings call.
- ▶ 1:20:42 John Bathgate I actually think it would be painful for everyone that, you know, loves iMessage and FaceTime, but like, it really would not be as big of a deal versus if, if for some reason, you know, China moved to, um, to seize Taiwan or however, you…
- ▶ 1:21:12 John Bathgate If you think, you know, shortages kind of from the way that auto, auto guys manage their inventory, um, and kind of just like the classic post recession, semiconductor shortages you always get, um, you go from there to, um, you know, what…
- ▶ 1:25:29 John Bathgate So I guess, like, the full circle question or answer to your question on, like, how we even incorporate the geopolitical risk on, on TSMC is, I mean, I guess it'll never be our, like, a 10% position for, for that reason, um, as there is…
Standard Oil Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 1:33:45 Ben Gilbert It's like, yep, I think it's something like 70% of the leading edge CPUs flow through the island of Taiwan