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TAIPEI – The United States has convened a preliminary meeting of a working group with East Asian countries to discuss semiconductor supply chain resilience and cooperation, a Taiwan official said Friday.
“We exchanged views in a first preliminary meeting and hope that everyone can discuss how to collaborate in the future on supply chain issues like the ones we encountered recently,” said Taiwan’s Economy Minister Wang Mei- hua, to the reporters in Taipei.
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The global chip shortage, which over the past two years has wreaked havoc on supply chains and forced automakers to halt production, has put Taiwan’s chip powerhouse in the spotlight and turned supply chain management a higher priority for governments around the world.
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The preliminary meeting of the working group, which has been dubbed ‘Chip 4’, also included representatives from South Korea and Japan, Wang said.
The group includes critical players in the global semiconductor industry, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd, the world’s largest contract chip maker, South Korean memory chip giants Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and SK Hynix, and Japanese suppliers key to semiconductor materials and equipment.
Last month, President Tsai Ing-wen told visiting US lawmakers that Taiwan is committed to ensuring its partners have reliable supplies of semiconductors, or “democracy chips,” and urged allies to boost cooperation · collaboration amid China’s intensified threats.
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China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory. Taiwan’s government rejects China’s sovereignty claims.
South Korea’s foreign ministry said the country’s top representative in Taiwan attended a preliminary meeting on Wednesday of the “East Asian Semiconductor Supply Chain Resilience Working Group” organized by the American Institute of Taiwan (AIT).
AIT, the de facto US embassy in Taiwan, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kyung Kye-hyun, who heads Samsung’s chip business, said earlier this month that his company has expressed concerns about the proposed Chip 4 alliance, including the need for South Korea to seek the understanding of China before any negotiations. (Reporting by Sarah Wu; Additional reporting by Joyce Lee in Seoul; Editing by Edmund Klamann)
