TSMC officially announced a very sudden and unexpected news:TSMC Chairman Liu Deyin will no longer participate in the nomination of the next chairman and will retire after next year’s shareholders’ meeting.At the same time, TSMC nominated the current CEO and Vice Chairman Wei Zhejia to take over as chairman, and the final results will be subject to the results of the board of directors election in June next year.
TSMC did not disclose the reason for Liu Deyin’s retirement.The industry generally speculates that it is taking the blame for the failure of TSMC's US factory.
In response to the call of the United States, TSMC went to Arizona to build a wafer factory with great fanfare. As a result, not only was the cost high, but it also encountered a series of problems such as local culture, laws and regulations, talent, and labor unions. The progress was repeatedly delayed. It currently looks like it will not be put into production until at least 2025. It is completely different from the smooth construction of Japanese factories.
More importantly, TSMC's total investment in building factories in the United States is as high as US$52 billion, of which US$39 billion comes from US subsidies. However, this subsidy has been delayed, putting TSMC's funds in a dilemma.
Whether to bite the bullet and continue, or to stop losses in time, is the difficult question facing TSMC's U.S. factories.
Zhang Zhongmou once said bluntly that it is simply impossible for the United States to re-establish a wafer factory on the scale of TSMC, at least in the short term, and it would be too naive to think that you can enter the world's most complex chip manufacturing market by spending money.
Liu Deyin was born in 1954. He received a master's degree and a doctoral degree in electrical engineering and computer information from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1983 to 1987, he worked at Intel to develop microprocessor silicon process technology. From 1987 to 1993, he worked at AT&T Bell Labs to develop optical communications.
Liu Deyin joined TSMC in 1993 and served as chairman after the retirement of TSMC founder Zhang Zhongmou in 2018. He has been there for five years.