61–70 of 131 posts
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Europe has plenty of manufacturing. >I doubt, because manufacturing means missing climate goals. So you are saying a chip factory can not be powered by green energy. Why? Taiwan does it, too: https://www.evwind.es/2020/07/08/orsted-taiwans-tsmc-sign-wo...
More the things containing chips like plastic widgets and appliances
Around 2004 I visited the chipmaking industry in Dresden on a university field trip. We went to AMD and to AMTC (Advanced Mask Technology Center). It looked like they were doing pretty well, they were increasing production capacity and also doing research, and AMD and others were investing a lot of money. I think now the whole campus belongs to Globalfoundaries. It is really sad how the domestic/western production be…
>The US is steamrolling us, because 1) they think and act strategic, 2) size-wise, they are not one country but many countries and city-states working as one and 3) they are beating us at our own game because we have a slavish devotion to WTO principles while they will use protectionism if it benefits them.
This is as true overall IMO. I'm not going anywhere special with this comment (and not bashing neither the US or PRC) but I though it worthwhile to keep in mind that China isn't doing anything others aren't too in similar ways. I don't think it will change though but we got a perfectly good litmus test of how it is now in the sale of ARM (though UK isn't in the EU of course). If it's sold we (as in Europeans) clearly haven't learnt yet.
Will I get lots of rotten tomatoes telling, that this is a huge waste of money? Chips production is one thing, but the whole ecosystem matters. So these chips produced in Europe must be sent back to Asia for integration in final products. Or a miracle will happen and European Union will resurrect manufacturing? I doubt, because manufacturing means missing climate goals.
Highend chip fab got to be big security / geo politics due to the US-China tech war. TSMC is under a perceived threat from China, and the US has prohibted the Chinese from using TSMC. This leaves a lot of business open to take. The US wants it back on their soil with the TSMC plant in Arizona. The Europeans want something similar. After all we have ASML here in the middle of western europe and god knows how many mid-…
I'm not sure how those factories compare though.
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Germany lost its edge not because of missing subsidies but because there are too many of them. Germany is taxing companies and people too much (40-50%) so capital is leaving the country. Actually, the same can be said about most of the western Europe.
They tried cutting taxes like crazy since Reagan and it's been a complete and utter bust.
The specific problem with chip manufacturing is that this is a dirty business requiring lots of chemicals and lots of water. There is simply no way anything like that can happen in Western Europe now. You will have millions of sanctimonious kids with nothing more meaningful in their lives than marching with signs about saving the ground, etc, and then angry politicians will get on soapboxes and denounce the greedy-ground-polluters in order to win elections, and so Europe will continue to buy their chips from factories located in East Asia or America, where there are jurisdictions in which people have other things to give their life meaning.
Manufacturing has been pouring into East Asia not because asians are better at manufacturing, but because they value it enough to make systematic efforts to attract and promote it. It's about values and worldviews much more than a simple thing like tax rates (although East Asia has reasonable business tax rates, they have phenomenally cheap credit for manufacturers, good infrastructure, and very stable regulations.)
Will I get lots of rotten tomatoes telling, that this is a huge waste of money? Chips production is one thing, but the whole ecosystem matters. So these chips produced in Europe must be sent back to Asia for integration in final products. Or a miracle will happen and European Union will resurrect manufacturing? I doubt, because manufacturing means missing climate goals.
We actually do have a lot of manufacturing in the EU; maybe not cheap plastic gizmos that you find at the store, but we have a relatively rich automotive industry which reaches into aerospace engineering and agriculture.
There is also some final component assembly (but that is not a major portion of value add), it is used to capture subsidies and claim that stuff is "made in X" when it is assembled from parts made all over the world.
The problem is that this is critically depending on IP -- e.g. your designs not being stolen -- and also there are some industries where manufacturing knowledge is the value-add rather than the design. In those situations, Europe can't compete because the factories are elsewhere. America suffers from the same issues and is also falling behind, so this is a general issue with "the west".
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They tried cutting taxes like crazy since Reagan and it's been a complete and utter bust.
This is when people get all confused by the difference between "necessary" and "sufficient". You need a lot more than lower taxes to make a business-friendly environment, and in some sense these are fungible. Businesses can pay more taxes in order to get other advantages, like more flexible labor policy, more skilled workers, or more stable regulations. People don't realize that stability of regulations is much more…
The question of political will is very real, but financial firepower? Chip manufacturering is expensive, but is Bloomberg suggestion that the EU doesn’t have the same financial firepower as Apple? Sure you also need to build a few fabs, and while expensive, it’s not that expensive if you’re a government (or the EU).
More realistic the EU members will fight over in which countries to spend the money.
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This is when people get all confused by the difference between "necessary" and "sufficient". You need a lot more than lower taxes to make a business-friendly environment, and in some sense these are fungible. Businesses can pay more taxes in order to get other advantages, like more flexible labor policy, more skilled workers, or more stable regulations. People don't realize that stability of regulations is much more…
Yeah, why aren’t we destroying the environment in Europe more? This is a great question. Kids these days have it too easy. They barely get any lead in their water.
Moreover the environment is not some fragile thing that is "destroyed" by a chip plant. So here, too, there is a lack of understanding about what is happening so that people can make claims of personal righteousness (and the "environment" is just a place-holder that can and is swapped out for other concerns that yield more self-righteousness credits per unit effort at the drop of a hat).
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We actually do have a lot of manufacturing in the EU; maybe not cheap plastic gizmos that you find at the store, but we have a relatively rich automotive industry which reaches into aerospace engineering and agriculture.
A manufacturing network that is closing down. Export market shares in the world keep falling. The best Europe can do is to protect whatever they can keep of the past glories. That should be good enough!