China’s threat to Taiwan shakes the world

Chinese military maneuvers off Taiwan shake the world. What would become of Western economies if they were deprived of semiconductors from this island? They are under the threat of a kind of giant blackout of all their production tools, subject to the lack of the smallest components. The high European and American dependence on Taiwan, which accounts for more than half of the world’s chip production, cruelly underlines the abandonment of its own industrial tool.

In twenty years, the market shares in the chip sector of these two blocks have melted, sucked up by the sacrosanct model of the “fabless”, these companies without factories which subcontract manufacturing far from their territory. In 1990, the United States accounted for 44% of global chip production and Europe for 37%. Today, the figures are dizzying: only 12% for Uncle Sam and 10% for the Old Continent. At the same time, the Taiwanese giant TSMC has gone…