The 2021 ship shortage pushed great powers to take back control of the semiconductor industry, attempting to redraw supply chains concentrated in East Asia, and eroding Taiwan’s strategic importance and bargaining power.
Chinese smartphone maker Oppo disbanded its chip design house Zeku in May, stimulating commentary on Zeku being the latest victim of the US-China chip war among the media in China. However, blaming geopolitical pressure for Zeku s failure does not help stakeholders to prevent the same mistake from recurring. Zeku s CEO Liu Jun and Oppo founder Duan Yongping made it clear: with sales far lower than expected, the investment needed for self-designed chips went through of the roof and it became prohibitively difficult to sustain the operation, thus.
With China formally imposing sanctions on Micron Technology, possible consequent impacts on Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are fast drawing market concerns, and both Korean suppliers are expected to face greater uncertainties and suffer more than benefit in the longer term, given the intensifying China-US conflicts surrounding the semiconductor industry amid the deteriorating semiconductor market conditions, according to market observers.
At the G7 summit in Hiroshima, leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies said that they need to de-risk and not decouple from China. It means reducing Beijing’s control of global supply chains but not isolating it completely