TSMC Founder Morris Chang

Bullish:

• $TSMC - TSMC's strategic bet on 28nm technology established their technology leadership despite board concerns, demonstrating management's ability to make bold capital allocation decisions that paid off

  • “I decided that 28 nanometer was gonna be our tide.”

    Morris·46:47
• $SEMI - The semiconductor industry has grown 20x since 1987 and continues to benefit from massive tailwinds including AI and digital transformation

  • “Since TSMC was founded in 1987, the world's semiconductor market has grown from 26 billion to 527 billion last year.”

    Ben·2:45:49
• $NVDA - NVIDIA's early partnership with TSMC not only saved the company during financial difficulties but established them as a major customer, demonstrating the enduring value of their relationship

  • “NVIDIA was in financial difficulties, but the chip that he wanted now to have foundered would not only save the company, it would also make NVIDIA a major customer of TSMC.”

    Morris·8:29
• $ARM - ARM's architecture enabled the semiconductor industry's reorganization and value chain rearrangement, playing a pivotal role in breaking Intel's dominance

  • “The rise of ARM. If you try to play forward a world where Intel and the x86 architecture had maintained its dominance, you wouldn't have had this window, this opportunity for the value chain to sort of rearrange itself.”

    Ben·1:25:45
• $AAPL - Apple's enormous bargaining power with suppliers is demonstrated by TSMC's tens of billions in investment to secure them as a customer, showing Apple's dominant position in the supply chain

  • “We invested so much, even though we took only half of the original demand, it was still tens of billions of dollars... And now if Apple went to Samsung for the 16, where did that leave us?”

    Morris·51:09

Bearish:

• $INTC - Intel fundamentally doesn't understand how to operate as a foundry business, a structural weakness that prevented them from winning Apple's iPhone business and continues to limit their ability to compete

  • “Intel just does not know how to be a foundry.”

    Morris·43:27
• $SOLAR - The solar manufacturing industry has been destroyed by Chinese subsidies creating persistent overcapacity and extremely low prices, making it structurally unattractive outside China

  • “The solar business could have been pretty good. However, China ruined it, subsidized the hell out of it, and they now control their business, solar cells. The prices were extremely low, still low, still low.”

    Morris·27:42
• $IBM - IBM's semiconductor business was recognized as being in trouble in the late 1990s when their main customer Qualcomm shifted to TSMC, signaling their decline in the foundry space

  • “So I immediately knew that IBM semiconductor was in trouble. Because, I mean, they had their own fabs and so on. But their main business was really supplying to Qualcomm and a few other very small companies.”

    Morris·1:59:37