Monday, August 29, 2005
Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association (TSIA) recently warned Taiwan should prevent mainland Chinese dumping of chips on the island from happening after learning an alarming study on Taiwan’s imports of the mainland’s chips.
Taiwan Institute of Economic Research and Industrial Economics and Knowledge Center (IEK) recently co-released the study, which indicated Taiwan imported an unusually high amount of mainland China-made memory chips including dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and static random access memory (SRAM) chips in the first half of the year, making the mainland Taiwan’s third-largest supply source of DRAM chips and its second-largest source of SRAM chips.
M.R. Peng, an IEK research specialist, pointed out that in the second quarter alone, mainland China-made DRAM chips surged to account for 9.6% of the Taiwan’s total imports, following South Korea’s 67.5% and Singapore’s 11.4% shares. The mainland’s exports to Taiwan average at NT$71 (US$2.3 at US$1:NT$31) a chip, far below the average NT$88 (US$2.8) a chip from all import sources. Taiwan now needs NT$50 billion (US$1.6 billion) of computer memory chips island-wide a year.
The mainland even supplied as high as 16.8% of Taiwan’s imports of SRAM chips in the first half of the year, making it the second-largest exporter of the chips to Taiwan next only to Japan. In this sector, the mainland’s average export price was only half the total average.
Peng noted that imports from the mainland had not caused damages to Taiwan’s semiconductor industry although they posed an alarm. Samsung Electronics and Micron Technologies are still Taiwan’s primary competitors in computer memory market.
TSIA’s director general, J.S. Huang, pointed out that the mainland’s chipmakers had exported a large amount of undercutting chips under mainland authorities’ aggressive semiconductor-industry policy. However, he said what he really worried was that many of the mainland’s chip suppliers had begun offering high-end products, particularly base-band chips for telecommunications systems. For a long time, the mainland’s chip designers have been known for offering low-end chips for such applications as consumer electronics, toys and analog devices.
The two institutes released the study for the first time although they had tracked the mainland’s chip exports to Taiwan for five years. They do the research in order to give alarms on unusual Taiwanese imports of semiconductors, helping the island’s chip industry turn out countermeasu
By: Docmemory
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