TSMC Chairman Mark Liu Retires

I have to admit I was very surprised by the news when it came up. Mark Liu, TSMC’s chairman, is retiring. He gave a statement roughly goes something like this:

For the past thirty years, contributing my efforts at TSMC has been an extraordinary journey for me. I am especially grateful to the company's extremely talented team. Together, we have shaped the company into today's industry benchmark. It is a great honor to take over as Chairman of TSMC after the retirement of the company's legendary founder. I now hope to retire but not to rest, to give back in different ways based on my decades of semiconductor experience, to spend more time with my family, and to start a new chapter in my life. I will continue to work with the Board of Directors on corporate governance until the last day of my term, and I am fully confident that TSMC will continue to achieve excellent performance in the foreseeable future

Right now I am swamped by work so I am not able to do a whole video on the topic, but I thought it would be interesting to at least talk a bit about TSMC’s succession issues and what might be next.

Founder Morris Chang has long struggled with the issue of succession. He was already in his late 50s when he first founded the company. So famously in 2005, he appointed Rick Tsai as his successor. Tsai had served in fab operations and then as the COO for a while.

Despite this, TSMC's 40 nanometer node had troubles ramping up its yields. The Global Financial Crisis struck, hurting the industry. Worse yet, TSMC fumbled a series of layoffs. The layoffs were deemed necessary considering the economic situation. But Taiwanese business media reported that those layoffs were implemented with insufficiently rigorous criteria. Workers who supposedly left voluntarily were protesting outside of Morris Chang's house.

TSMC met the expectations of the financial community. Nevertheless, on June 2009, just four years after the CEO handover, Morris Chang removed Tsai, reassigning him to a smaller division. Tsai is now the CEO of MediaTek. He restarted the succession process all over again, and then plunged the company into a massive capital expenditure that paved the way for Apple.

Chang did not completely retire from the company again until 2017 he was 86 years, when he brought Mark Liu and CC Wei ...