Founded at the age of 56… Became the absolute powerhouse in semiconductors that outpaced Samsung [뉴스人사이드]

Morris Chang, founder of TSMC

▲ Morris Chang, founder of TSMC

[아시아경제 권재희 기자]Bill Gates founded Microsoft (MS) at the age of 19. Steve Jobs founded Apple at the age of 21. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook at the age of 19.

However, there is a person who started a business at the age of 56 and raised it into a global company that is second to none.

It is Maurice Chang, who is called’the father of Taiwanese semiconductors’. He was late to start a business, but he devised the world’s first business model called a foundry (consignment production) and put my TSMC on the ranks of a global company.

Born in Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province, China in 1931, former chairman Chang moved to the United States after fighting in Nanjing, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong to escape the civil war and the Sino-Japanese War. He was named Jang Jung Mao, and from this time on, he was called Morris Chang.

After moving to the United States, he became a symbol of the’American Dream’. In 1949, he entered Harvard University in the U.S., but dreamed of becoming an engineer, and in 1952 he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and majored in mechanical engineering. Later, he entered the semiconductor industry by joining Texas Instruments (TI), a conglomerate semiconductor company in the United States, as an engineer. He went up to the position of vice president in 1978.

Then he suddenly headed to Taiwan in 1985 at the age of 54. At that time, the Taiwanese government requested that Chang, former chairman, assume the position of president of the Taiwan Institute of Industrial Technology to foster high-tech industries. His trip to Taiwan led to the establishment of TSMC.

After returning to Taiwan, he started TSMC in 1987. He was 56 years old.

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As a vice president from one of the leading American conglomerates, he gave up his comfortable retirement and started a business, and everyone held back. But looking back, 56 was just a leap forward in his life.

In order for Taiwan to have national competitiveness, it started a business with a sense of mission to foster the high-tech semiconductor industry.

Former Chairman Chang devised a new business model called’Foundry’ based on the know-how accumulated while working as a semiconductor engineer in the US for a long time. TSMC was the first company in the world to apply it.

At the time, the semiconductor industry was dominated by general semiconductor companies such as IBM and TI in the US and Toshiba in Japan. Comprehensive semiconductor companies are companies in charge of both design and production, and they sometimes hindered competition by pressing technology transfers on small fabless (design and development companies) companies with huge arms. Having grasped the structure of the semiconductor industry, Chairman Chang came up with the concept of a pure foundry that does not compete with design companies and only produces on-demand. As a result, small fabless companies were able to build a stable business environment by requesting TSMC to manufacture semiconductors, and TSMC was able to grow rapidly.

This is considered as the background for fabless companies such as Broadcom and Nvidia that focus only on semiconductor design.

If Chairman Chang started a business when others retired, he returned to management when he really had to retire. He resigned from TSMC chairmanship in 2005, but returned to management at the age of 78 in 2009 when TSMC fell into crisis due to the financial crisis three years later. He made a “crisis into an opportunity” by returning to the company when it was difficult and making large-scale investments.The amount of annual investment that had been reduced to $1.5 billion at the time was increased to $1.9 billion in two months, and then to $4.8 billion, the largest ever TSMC.

▲ Morris Chang, founder of TSMC

The employee who had been fired due to the financial crisis was also reinstated. Research and development (R&D) personnel also increased by 30%.

It has taken a completely different path from those of companies that are trying to slim down their organization in a crisis. There were also great concerns around them. But his prediction was correct.

A year after he returned to management. In 2010, TSMC’s sales increased by 41.9% over the previous year to KRW 4195 billion.

Was the belief of former chairman Chang as the DNA of TSMC? TSMC continues to invest aggressively enough to surprise the semiconductor industry once again. Taking advantage of the global semiconductor supply shortage, which has been continuing since last year, it has announced a history of investment plans since the beginning of the year. TSMC plans to establish a semiconductor R&D company by investing 12 billion dollars in Arizona by 2024 to build a 5-nano process foundry process, followed by investing 210 billion won in Japan.

According to Trend Force, a market research organization in Taiwan, TSMC ranked first in the global foundry market at 54% as of last year, overtaking Samsung Electronics (17%), the second place. Following this, Global Foundry (GF) of the US and UMC of Taiwan were tied for third place with 7% each. China’s SMIC was followed by 5%.

TSMC’s motto is’Do not compete with customers’.

Former Chairman Chang said, “The secret that TSMC has been successful in the meantime is because it has always found suitable partners. In the era of graphics, we did business with companies like Apple and Qualcomm.” This is a passage that shows his vision of’sharing values’.

Reporter Kwon Jae-hee [email protected]