[Virtual Webinar] The Global Supply Chain and Semiconductor Industry: Asia’s Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Challenges and Opportunities

Moderated by Nikkei Asia Desk Editor Katsuhiko Hara and featuring an expert insightful panel comprised of Asia Society’s Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S. - China Relations Orville Schell, Nikkei Asia Tech Correspondent Lauly Li, Jimmy Goodrich, Vice President, Global Policy, Semiconductor Industry Association, and Ondrej Burkacky, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company.

Geopolitics, especially the rise of protectionism, is one of the major forces to lead the changes of the semiconductor supply chain in recent years. The U.S. government recently introduced a wide scope of export controls against the Chinese semiconductor sector, further shaking the dynamics of the chip industry. The resilience of the semiconductor supply chain is what we are seeing in many of the major economies, including the U.S., Europe, Japan, China, Taiwan, and India. These tiny chips have become a matter of national security, as they empower every electronics product from smartphones, PCs, to automobiles, military tech, and space tech.

China, as early as in 2014, launched the first phase of the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, or nicknamed the Big Fund, a major funding vehicle to support the building of a domestic chip supply chain. It became a full-blown national campaign when former U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration blacklisted and cut off American technologies to China’s tech champion Huawei Technologies. For the fear of being blacklisted by Washington, many Chinese companies have been hoarding excessive supplies while they could, which is part of the reason why the world experienced the unprecedented chip and component shortages.

On the U.S. front, in May 2020, the U.S. government successfully asked the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to build its first advanced chip in Arizona – TSMC’s first chip facility in the U.S. for 20 years. Japan also lured TSMC to build its first-ever chip facility in the country. The European Union already passed its CHIPS Act to support strengthening their own semiconductor supply chain, and the U.S. also approved its $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act this past summer. Also, Intel, has launched massive plans to build new capacity in the U.S. and Europe. But the semiconductor supply chain isn’t built overnight as it is extremely costly, time-consuming, and requires a lot of talents to support the ecosystem.

Chip-making is very complicated that requires hundreds of equipment, materials, chemicals, specialty gas sourcing from companies across continents that is impossible to do it all by one single country. What are the short and long-term challenges, and opportunities, for building a resilient global supply chain in the face of growing geopolitical and geoeconomic challenges in Asia and around the world? Join us and find out!

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Katsuhiko Hara is the Nikkei Asia Chief Desk Editor.  He is based in New York and is leading the team of senior editors on news regarding macroeconomics, politics and international relations across Asia and the world.

Previously, he served as the chief correspondent of Nikkei’s Geneva Bureau for five years, reporting on variety of topics such as international organizations, WTO and WHO, global companies like Nestle and Ikea, Italian politics, Swiss finance, Iran nuclear deal, FIFA scandals and the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

He also has eleven years of experience in reporting consumer sector.

Lauly Li has been the tech correspondent for Nikkei Asia since March 2018. Based in Taiwan, Li has more than eight years of experience covering the Greater China tech supply chain from chip manufacturing to final electronics assembly. Li has been closely following the US-China tech war and the mega trend of tech supply chain restructuring in the past few years. She is the joint recipient of honourable mentions for 2021 SABEW Best in Business Awards in technology and feature writing with her colleague Ms. Cheng Ting-fang over their work on featuring China's hidden chipmaking champions. She is also the recipient of the gold award for feature writing for the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) in 2021. 

Jimmy Goodrich joined Semiconductor Industry Association in 2015 and is vice president for global policy. In this role, Jimmy leads SIA’s global policy team and directs SIA’s international competitiveness, trade, export control, supply chain, global market research, and China policy agenda.

Jimmy has a diverse background in international technology trade, supply-chain, and security issues spanning a wide range of geographies. Previously he was director of China policy at the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) in Washington D.C. Before moving to Washington D.C. in 2012, Jimmy spent a total of seven years working in the tech sector in China, including for Cisco Systems, APCO Worldwide, and USITO.

Jimmy has a bachelor’s degree in comparative politics and East Asian studies from Ohio University. He is professionally fluent in Mandarin and serves on the Executive Committee for Beijing-based United States Information Technology Office (USITO), representing SIA in his capacity and on the Board of Directors of the American Mandarin Society, which promotes mandarin-language study for young Americans.

 Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Schell is the author of fifteen books, ten of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. His most recent books are: Wealth and Power, China’s Long March to the 21st Century; Virtual Tibet; The China Reader: The Reform Years; and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders. He has written widely for many magazine and newspapers, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Time, The New Republic, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, the China Quarterly, and The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

Schell was born in New York City, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and earned a Ph.D. (Abd) at University of California, Berkeley in Chinese History. He worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and has traveled widely in China since the mid-70s.

He is a Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Schell is also the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism.

Ondrej Burkacky is a Senior Partner of McKinsey & Company's Munich office. He joined McKinsey in 2007. He is the global leader of McKinsey's Semiconductor Practice. His client focus is on mainly on semiconductor IDMs, foundries and fabless players with a functional focus on technology enabled growth, R&D and manufacturing. Ondrej holds a master in Chemistry and a PhD in Physical Chemistry from University of Munich.