Story of TSMC

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]You will be surprised to know that a mechanism turned a small island with no natural resources into the most indispensable economy in the world and it had almost nothing to do with the products they were making. In 1976, Taiwan's government licensed semiconductor technology from one American company and trained a generation of engineers. They were not trying to build a chip empire, they were trying to learn precision manufacturing.

[00:00:20]What grew around that, the supplier networks, the quality standards, the tacit knowledge passed from engineer to engineer, became TSMC. 165 billion dollars in revenue, 92% of the world's most advanced chips and 20% of Taiwan's entire GDP. The product was just the door, the ecosystem was the price. And here is what India is sitting inside of right now. Apple has 45 component suppliers in India. Tata Electronics grew from 15,000 to 75,000 workers in 2 years. Indian companies are now making printed circuit boards and phone housings that are being shipped to China for assembly. The direction has reversed. Local value addition in electronics went from near zero to close to 20% in under a decade. And here is what that means for you. The CNC machinist in Hosur, the process engineer in Tamil Nadu, the automation specialist at Wipro party, you are not on an assembly line. You are inside the knowledge transfer that Taiwan spent 30 years building. India is at year zero of that story. Share it with someone who needs to hear this.