TSMC to increase investment in chip plant in Japan's Kumamoto, Denso to join the TSMC/SONY partnership

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Now this new fab will support both 12/16 nm and 22/28nm production. Denso is owned by Toyota and ranked number 2, behind Bosch, in supplying automobile parts worldwide.

Kyodo News Plus: TSMC to increase investment in chip plant in Japan's Kumamoto.

TSMC to increase investment in chip plant in Japan's Kumamoto

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. said Tuesday that it will increase its capital spending for a plant to be built in Japan's southwestern prefecture of Kumamoto by 20 percent to $8.6 billion to boost its production capacity.

english.kyodonews.net

 

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With Denso's participation, this TSMC fab gets a huge boost in future revenue growth. Denso is ranked number 2 in the world for supplying automobile parts. Although owned by Toyota, Denso provides auto parts to all US, European, Korean, and Japanese carmakers, such as Audi, Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, Fiat, GM, Chrysler, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Subaru, Nissan, and Hyundai.

It will be interesting if TSMC will do a similar joint venture in Europe.

Also by adding 12/16 nm capacity to this Japanese fab, it will help TSMC to capture higher price, higher margin, and higher growth segments in automobile, industrial, and consumer markets.

 

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It will be interesting if TSMC will do a similar joint venture in Europe.

TSMC's Chairman, Mark Liu, seemed to go out of his way to suggest that JASM (Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing) was a special case during the Q4 earnings call in January. My personal interpretation was that he was publicly reassuring Japan and Sony that they made a great investment.

“This is Mark. To answer your first question about Europe, this is still very early stage we are assessing. To start the overseas fab, there are many, many considerations.

Among them, the top few is -- firstly is the -- our customers' needs. And so in this current planning in the Japan fab, indeed, it was a joint venture. We haven't done joint venture for many years. And we think this joint venture is a -- also a special case.

Typically, every TSMC fab, no matter where it's located, will serve all the customer from around the world. And this Japan joint venture were also the same. However, with -- in Japan, we have a very large customer who is a -- have a single technology, and we can also leverage their operating and manufacturing experience in Japan, which help us ramp in the learning curve. So that made us make the decision of a joint venture fab with Sony, where we have a majority share.

So this is a special case. And we -- typically, we are considered to proceed a solely owned fab with 100% ownership. Yes.” - Mark Liu