2 ms·
It's high value but low margins work. It played a major role into why Intel began offshoring a large portion of it's fab work abroad back in the 1990s-2000s, an
by alephnerd 1y ago
It's high value but low margins work. It played a major role into why Intel began offshoring a large portion of it's fab work abroad back in the 1990s-2000s, and also why TSMC became a player in the space undercutting Japanese, Korean, Singapore, and Malaysian/American (Intel) vendors.
> TSMC is known for overpaying
Never heard that in my life. Underpay sure.
- contrarian1234 1y agoIn Taiwan they are by far the highest paying employer (maybe Google/Microsoft branches here are comparable). The base pay is usually not impressive, but they come with insane bonus packages. They basically hoover up all the top graduates that haven't left abroad. They're kind of notorious for have overqualified workers. PhDs left monitoring assembly lines or writing accounting software
- alephnerd 1y ago> In Taiwan My bad - didn't see the qualifier for Taiwan there. Yea, TSMC pay is decent by Taiwan standards, but imo that's largely because Taiwan salaries are fairly low even compared to other East Asian nations when factoring CoL.
- elcritch 1y agoGoogling TSMC margin and it looks to be 53%-59% gross margin. That is after they became the leading global fab of course. No doubt keeping costs low helped them get to that stage. Still that's a crazy margin. I imagine much of it's re-invested. IMHO, Intel could've kept up but dropped the ball pretty hard. The volume of ARM / cell phone cpus caught them off guard and huge amounts of revunue let TSMC drive forward.