Morris Chang
Taiwanese businessman and electrical engineer (born 1931)
Morris Chang Chung-mou (Chinese: 張忠謀; born 10 July 1931) is a Taiwanese billionaire business executive and electrical engineer. He is the founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and was the company's chief executive officer (CEO) from 1987 to 2005, and its chairman until 2018.
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Quotes
edit- The conductivity of a semiconductor is between that of a conductor (metal) and an insulator (wood). You can control the conductivity of the semiconductor. In short it is between metal and wood, so we call it semiconductor.
- In 2021, Intel, the former dominant player, announced that they are also going to provide wafer manufacturing services. This is quite ironic to me. Originally they were the dominant player, and frankly they looked down on wafer manufacturing, thinking that this thing couldn't do much. I was acquainted with them, so at first I sought investment from Intel.
- Of course professional managerial leadership is important too. I think TSMC is the largest company in Taiwan and led by professional managers, everyone from the chairman down. Of course, there are disadvantages as well, but I do think that to set up a world-class enterprise, deploying a professional managerial leadership is still a better model.
- American talents are not as good as Taiwanese ones, whether it’s engineers, technicians, foremen, or operators. The personnel dispatched by Taiwan to the US, like I said, are not necessarily the best in terms of management ability. The US also lacks the ability to mobilize manufacturing personnel on a large scale.
- Some people are now saying that we have a "protective mountain of the nation". If the definition of that is an industry that is important to the world and Taiwan has a high market share, then you need to find an industry where Taiwan has potential advantages and it’s important to the world.
- Semiconductor wafer manufacturing is an important industry that impacts people's livelihood, economy, and national defense. It is also the first industry in which Taiwan has gained considerable advantages in world competitiveness. These advantages are not easy to obtain or keep. I hope that the government, society, and TSMC itself will make efforts to protect them.
- Why is TSMC successful in Taiwan? Because TSMC also gets good, well-trained technicians, and even well-trained operators from a lot of trade schools in Taiwan. … Their students aspire to make a good living as technicians.
- Without national security, we will lose everything, everything that we value. By all means, let’s avoid even a Cold War, if we can.
- So the early part of my life between birth and 18, the background was war, poverty, injustice. So those three things—war, poverty and injustice—they dominated the backdrop, the environment in which I grew up. War, first the Second Sino-Japanese War, then of course the Second World War, and then the [Chinese] Civil War. And I lived through all of them. China was so poor, most of the people were so poor, even middle class for me that I was born in. We didn’t starve, we were not hungry ever, but our life style was very, very modest compared to a middleclass family lifestyle now. Injustice. Even back in those chaotic days of my youth, I could see and also read about people that were very rich and very powerful and indeed. I even saw, I even met some of them as a young person. But those were just in the very small minority and most of the people that I saw were also middleclass. They also lived very, very modestly and then there were a large number of people that simply didn’t know where their next meal would come from. And people that didn’t have adequate housing, I saw a lot of those people too. And so how did that background influence me? Well, first of all, I knew that war was just a terrible thing. I knew that abject poverty was also a terrible thing and injustice, social injustice. I saw something that lots of people ground their teeth at…myself included. So much resentment, so much hatred in a socially unjust environment. Now the personal lesson to me was, well, I needed to study hard and later on, work hard. And hope that there will be peace. That was the personal lesson to me.
- think the Asian engineers tend to be more methodical, they tend to be more studious, more orderly engineers; whereas, the U.S. engineers tend to be more innovative, but they tend not to be as methodical and orderly as the Asian engineers. I mean, there are obviously many exceptions to the norm. In the U.S., you also find the Asian type of engineers, you know, methodical, orderly but not very innovative. And, by the same token, in Asia you find many innovative engineers too. But the norm is as I described it for Asia and for the U.S. But certainly those two categories of abilities are not exclusive to each other. You can have the same two; you can have them at the same time in one person. On the other hand, I also think that one group can complement another group. You can have an innovative group but not so methodical, and then you can have a methodical group maybe not very innovative complement each other.
- You cannot understand the modern world without putting semiconductors at the center of your analysis, and you cannot understand the semiconductor industry without putting TSMC at the center of the story.
- When we first founded TSMC, I just wanted the company to survive. I just didn't want to let down the government who had basically funded half of it. But when we went into the 90s, it was a case of continually rising expectations. I certainly did not expect TSMC to be as big, as important as it was all the way in the 90s, or even into 2010. But from 2010 on, I really expected TSMC to be what it is now.
- Buying machine tools from the US and Netherlands, and materials and chemicals from Japan. Taiwan's success story is not about Taiwan doing it alone, but a story of integration of the best in the world.
- There's no question in my mind that at least in the chip sector, globalization is dead. Just look at the way China has been embattled. Free trade is not quite that dead, but it's in danger.
- In Japan, we have graduates from trade schools that are very willing to be trained to be precision equipment manufacturers. As a result, the equipment stays up 90 percent or higher. In the US, it's only 60 percent.
- There is a concentration of chip manufacturing in a few countries because they are competitive in what they are doing. For example, the US has excellent design capability because they are close to the market’s needs. On the other hand, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea have the competitive advantage in manufacturing. It’s the work cultures in those cultures that matter
- "TSMC founder Morris Chang: Taiwan is indispensable in global chip industry” in Commonwealth Magazine (2023)
- Now I started in the semiconductor industry in 1955. Now, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and the very early part of the ‘70s, the U.S. was very strong in manufacturing talents. Now, in a speech that I made in Taiwan about a year ago, I said Taiwan had certain competitive strengths in semiconductor manufacturing, and those strengths mainly almost entirely were people related, talent related. Now, the U.S. in the ‘50s, ‘60s and the early part of ‘70s also had these strengths. But then, of course, talents usually migrated to higher profit occupations. And so, the manufacturing talents in the U.S. started to migrate to design aspects, design profession if they stay in the industry.
- Now, of course, there are people who point out that maybe Taiwan is not safe. Now, that’s of course another topic. Now, I’m assuming that there will not be any war. Frankly, if there is a war in Taiwan Strait, then I think the United States will have more than chips to worry about. Now, if there’s no war, then I think the effort to increase onshore manufacturing of semiconductors is a wasteful and expensive exercise in futility, if there’s no war. If there is war then, my goodness, we all have a lot more than just chips to worry about.
