Semiconductor manufacturing is both capital- and talent-intensive: Even with the best equipment on the market, a company cannot mass-produce chips without technicians to work on them.
Chinese players are now trying to overcome the barrier by recruiting not only top executives, but entire production teams on the ground,” a Taiwanese industry insider said. “They are paying two to three times as much as Taiwanese companies.”
Taiwanese companies are finding themselves outmatched. “We are improving our compensation, but it is difficult to compete with mainland companies,” Nanya Technology President Lee Pei-ing said.
Taiwan updated its trade secrets act in 2013, imposing prison sentences of up to 10 years for leaking corporate secrets outside the island. But this has not deterred career moves to the mainland in the semiconductor industry.
The effect of these transplants is noticeable. China’s Changxin Memory Technologies and Yangtze Memory Technologies next year are slated to start mass-producing memory chips, one of Taiwan’s strengths. As a market for semiconductor manufacturing equipment, mainland China is expected to surpass Taiwan as the world’s largest next year.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/Taiwan-loses-3-000-chip-engineers-to-Made-in-China-2025
China Aiming to Overtake South Korea in Semiconductor Industry
According to the Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI), South Korea’s and China’s semiconductor equipment investments for this year are estimated at US$9.2 billion and US$11.7 billion, respectively. In addition, those for next year are estimated at US$11.7 billion and US$14.5 billion, respectively.
http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=38711