台积电张忠谋 _ 阿里巴巴蔡崇信 同台圆桌访谈2023.10 【中英】

台积电张忠谋 _ 阿里巴巴蔡崇信 同台圆桌访谈

文字记录:
说话人 1 00:04
Hello and good afternoon. Welcome, everyone. I am so incredibly privileged and honored to be on this stage today with two extraordinary icons, Doctor Morris Cheng and Joe CAI, who have both founded and created extraordinary powerful companies, Alibaba and TSMC with a combined market cap today of over six hundred and twenty five billion dollars. Extraordinary.

be incredibly privileged and honored to do ...
非常荣幸能做。。。

extraordinary icons   图标;偶像;图符;圣像;崇拜对象

a combined market cap
combined 联合的 ; 共同的 ; 总共的 ; 总计的 ; 结合，组合，联合，混合 ; 使融合 ; 兼有 ; 兼备 ; 兼做 ; 同时做 ; 兼办 ; combine的过去分词和过去式
market cap 市值 ; 总市值 ; 市场价值 ; 市场上限

说话人 1 00:33
And so today, I thought we would start the conversation with you, Doctor Chang. You were born in China and you lived in Hong Kong, but educated in the US at MIT and also at Stanford. For those of us in the room who haven’t had the pleasure of reading your wonderful biography, tell us what was the vision behind starting TSMC in Taiwan?

说话人 2 00:59
Well, I, at at the time I start the TSMC I had been in the semiconductor business for oh so almost 30 years already I was at Texas Instruments I started at a company called Sylvania the semiconductor division of severe and Sylvania and then I went to Texas Insurance in 1958 when I was 27 years old and as Ida just said I have the massive batches massive degree already but about two or three years after I got to taxes instruments they appreciated me enough to Sammy to Stanford to get my PhD on full salary and full expenses , they pay the tuition ,they pay the the miscellaneous expenses and they gave me full salary. in fact, I also had the the opportunity to go to technical meetings at TI’s expense. Anyway, it was a good opportunity, so I went to Stanford to come back and see, And in return for all this, of course, I had to commit myself to work 5 years at least in Ti after I got my PhD, Well, it turned out that I worked 20 years more, So altogether from the beginning to the end I worked at Ti for 25 years. Anyway ,then TI, for various reasons, started to go downhill. Not my fault ,okay. Because he went into a different business than a business that they were successful in, which was semiconductor business.So instead of just saying fast in the semiconductor business., they went into consumer products business calculators, digital watches and finally, worst of all, disastrously, they went into the so called home computer business. Anyway, for all those reasons, Ti went downhill. And also, the US, this was in the early 80s already. In the US I think was losing its competitive advantages in chips manufacturing. So at about that time, there was an interlude in another company where I was president, but it wasn’t a very good fit for me either.

miscellaneous
go downhill
interlude

说话人 2 04:49
So at that point, Taiwan government ask me to head up their research institute, industrial technology research institute. And while I was there , the Taiwan government also wanted me to start a semiconductor company. So with all the semiconductor experience already behind me, I decided that it would be suicidal for Taiwan, for me, to start a semiconductor company in Taiwan at that time and they will。 Was 1985 at that time was so instead of to start a normal standard IDM company in Thailand we would have to compete with the likes of text instruments Intel National Fair child all these established company not to mention Japanese companies and so instead of using the the standard business model which was to do everything from design to wafer chip manufacturing to sales marketing so I looked at the whole picture and decided Taiwan has had competitive advantages oh and I will not go into what those were at that time but maybe later maybe at compared just in the chips manufacturing part of this this is a chain so we start this new business model of being just a foundry, which is just the manufacturing wafer manufacturing ships, manufacturing part of a D, then standard model stand up is model of design and manufacturing, so on.

说话人 2 07:29
Now, anyway, and we were successful and that was, we start the, we began raising funds and so on in 85,1985. And we officially started our operation in 1987. And so we have been 36 years now and we’ve been quite successful. And we became, in fact, the largest manufacturing company. And even I think, I’m not sure how our revenue compares was all the, all the semiconductor company, companies, but we’re among the top. TSMC will have a revenue of something like 60,70 billion dollars. So we’re I’m on the top there now. I.

说话人 1 08:30
Think Doctor Chang is being quite modest when he says that he’s assumes quite a, it is the company in the world. So congratulations. And Joe, you have a similar story in that you’re a Taiwanese Canadian, but you were also educated in the US, right? You went to Lawrence Bill, Yale Law, and then you went to the legal industry before dabbling in private equity. So how did you get into Alibaba? How did you find this, found this new company with Jack Ma?

说话人 3 08:59
I just realized I took the wrong turn and went legal instead of doing chips or computer science. But I was born in Taiwan, grew up there until I was 13 and then my parents sent me to school in the United States. In fact, Doctor Chang just earlier today reminded me that when he got to Taiwan, one of the first people he met was my father, who was a lawyer that represented Texas Instruments and.

说话人 1 09:28
Small world.

说话人 2 09:29
The first person, actually.

说话人 3 09:31
The first.

说话人 2 09:31
Person. Because you were standing at the and of the back then there was no walkway. Me, right. It was.

说话人 3 09:40
The staircase.

说话人 2 09:42
The plane.

说话人 3 09:47
Exactly. And then he also reminded me that I have an uncle who worked at Intel Motorola and had a lot of chip patents under his name. And Doctor Chang try to hire my Uncle Roger.

说话人 2 10:02
Unsuccessful.

说话人 3 10:06
So you can imagine as a kid growing up in Taiwan, Doctor Chang is just the role model and iconic person. So I’m absolutely honored to share the same stage with Doctor Chang today.

说话人 1 10:20
Likewise. Absolutely.

说话人 2 10:24
You’re supposed to tell your story.

说话人 3 10:29
And I don’t. What was the question in US education?

说话人 1 10:34
How did you come about moving and pivoting from private equity and a legal background into founding this company with Jack?

说话人 3 10:40
So the lawyers don’t make any decisions. Lawyers only advice, advise people. So I wanted to get into a role where I can actually be involved in decision making. And that’s why I went into private equity. For someone with a legal background to go into private equity was fairly adjacent, I would say, because lawyers have to do documents and in these I m and a transactions and things like that. And then from private equity, I just, I Ju, I got lucky. I met Jack Ma in 1999 through a friend’s introduction, another friend from Taiwan. And then I went to his second floor apartment in these, this unit called the Lakeside Gardens. And it was a roomful of young fresh face for wide eyed people that are following Jack. There are sort of the disciples of Jack. And that was, the rest was history.

说话人 1 11:51
Incredible. Well, I think it’s safe to say that everyone that we speak to these days, particularly the large CEOs around the world, the No. 1 thing on their mind is the decoupling of US and China and the bifurcation of the two countries. Where do you see that headed? Joe, I’ll start with you.

说话人 3 12:13
I think there’s a couple of reasons for, that’s driving the decoupling. I think governments nowadays around the world, not just US and China, but governments around the world are worried about security, national security, and also they’re worried about digital security. So when you go to Europe, people talk about digital sovereignty had making sure that their citizens and their data privacy is protected. And for those reasons, I think supply chain is now being decoupled. And also in the digital world, we actually see a lot of fragmentation in the digital world.

说话人 1 13:01
Morris, any thoughts on that?

说话人 2 13:03
Well, I think the the best book that I have read on this phenomena was probably Graham Edison’s book. I think the. I forgot the title, I remember the subtitle the few subsidies trap. It was a situations where the existing power which is the United States is confronting the emerging power which is China and where medicine actually I believe he conduct he is a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and I believe that he actually conducted a a class five years for five years he studied are the examples of the facilities trap and for the for last 500 years, I believe the class, they found, something like 18 examples where an existing power confronted an emerging power. And in those 18 cases, 12 of them resulted in war and 6, however, did not. The most recent of the 6 that did not result in war, worse, for instance, the Cold War, Soviet Union and US, it was just cold.

说话人 2 15:05
Well, of course, now you said decoupling now. Yes, we can see it now. Our only hope, my only hope, our only hope is that it doesn’t live into anything even more serious. Even more serious.

说话人 1 15:27
And Doctor Chang, on that point, do you see an impact already on some of the technological innovation and newness that’s happening in the region because of this bifurcation and decoupling.

说话人 2 15:41
Well, I think that the becoming will. Oh, ultimately, oh, slow down everybody. Of course, the purpose of it is the immediate purpose. Of course, it’s true. So China down. And I think it’s doing that. I’m specifically talking about ships, of course. I don’t know some of the other areas about chips. I think the immediate purpose of the covering is to slow China down. And I think it’s doing that. Ultimately, I think maybe. And that’s it. Maybe. I think ultimately, I think it would be harmful to everybody. You know, I mean, I think the world of war, we all work together. Maybe west faster. Indeed.

说话人 1 16:53
Investor sentiment into the region, into Asia has been quite challenged recently. What would you say that we should be thinking about to make sure we don’t lose that dynamism. Right. In the region? How can we gain back that investor confidence into the region?

说话人 3 17:12
I think would Asia’s big place? But I think a lot of the cultures in Asia are quite similar in that people, industries and these economies have provided very high levels of edge education to the population. So for investors, the question you should ask investors is, do you wanna bet against people in Asia? Right. People who are hardworking and who are educated and it’s a place that people have to be it because I think you talk about dynamism. I think Asia is still a very dynamic place. I think we’ve seen a slowdown in China of the economy, but there’s a ton of industrious people, hardworking people working on new technologies, working on the fact that China is today is the largest manufacturing of the world, country in the world. And in the future, I still see China as being a manufacturing powerhouse, maybe not to the extent of many making very high end chips because that takes time to acquire the know how. But just to share demographics of China, you’re looking at about 800 million people that are in the labor force and 200 of them are educated, highly educated, skilled, highly skilled labor. There’s also a vocational school system. We, at lunchtime, we talk about vocational schools, people that are working on the shop floors that are sort of engineering supervisors that could create, make things. So I think Asia continues to be dynamic place because culturally people are hardworking and very entrepreneurial.

说话人 1 19:08
On the topic of education, if you could just spend a moment with me on that, because more, Doctor Chang, you said in your book and also I read that one of the reasons that you move to Taiwan in addition to the government as you go there, was that there’s a lot of talent there, right? You saw a lot of talented individuals that could really help you build the business that you were looking to build. So talk to me a little bit about your views of education in Asia versus education in US, which you both had the pleasure of attending.

说话人 2 19:35
Well, I was thought when I said there was a lot of talent, I meant specifically manufacturing talent. Yes. In manufacturing, you need, you really don’t need very many geniuses. You don’t need very many innovative thinkers. You do, you need a few, but not very many. But you need a lot of people who are discipline, who know their specific trade, repair and maintenance people, supervisory production supervisors and production engineers. So in Taiwan, they have a lot trade schools. Those are for people who don’t get to go to colleges. There’s an examination after high school graduation and only 20 or 30% of people pass the exam. Now only 20 or 30% of high school graduates get to go to the colleges that general purpose colleges but most of the rest can go to these trade schools, three year trade schools, five year trade schools and they learn specific skills which allow them really to get pretty good jobs after they graduate from high school. So that’s one advantage that the the Taiwan education system does have.

说话人 1 21:31
Joe, any thoughts on education?

说话人 3 21:37
Well, two things. I think American schools, whether it’s a high school, boarding school or university or hire master PhD programs is still aspirational for most people around the world. Parents still wanna send their kids for the United States to be educated here. And that’s because this country has a, a system that fosters freedom of thinking and get the, the geniuses, if you will, really can become even better that elite. I think American universities are very good at training the elite and people that have graduated from PhD programs from around the world go back to their countries and contribute in a great way. If you look at the heads of major technology companies in the United States, they come from all over the world and they are beneficiaries of an American high end education. But these are Ceos. What about the rest, right? What about the kid that kind of went to a little arts college and I end up being a Uber driver that that’s not you. So the thing that we have talked about in lunchtime is United States doesn’t have a vocational school program. Even in China, Taiwan has a vocational school program. Even in China, you’re looking at 10 million university graduates every year. But then there’s about 5 million, 5,6 million of vocational school graduates who they basically have given up going to college in middle school. They don’t even enter into the same kind of competitive examination system to get into high school. So they went on this vocational track. And when you are developing a manufacturing economy, that’s very handy that it’s a benefit to have a population of people who not, don’t aspire to work on large language models and computer science, but they can work on a shop floor manufacturing for, and supervise the work there. So, so that’s the main difference between the two. I.

说话人 2 23:58
Agree with Joe that the United States where it has the best top tier educational institutions the Ivy League schools, MIT and so on, no equal, as no equal in the world to those, to the fear of education.

说话人 3 24:25
We in the legal profession would like to say Yale Law School is a great theoretical school and the students come out and fail the bar exam. But Harvard Law School is more like a trade school. No, sorry.

说话人 1 24:44
So over lunch, we were discussing a bit about understanding, about the importance of communication, right? The way that we can better understand the differences between the countries, right, to maybe perhaps bring some more convergent ideas together on the table. What would your advice be to other leaders in the US or other CEOs in the US of how to better understand and work with China and more broadly with Asia?

说话人 2 25:17
You asking me? I certainly would advise them. To talk more and so on. If it’s any use. It’s usually, frankly, unfortunately it’s a particularly, if they already tough people in either business or government tonight. It’s not very useful to give an advice on how do we more cooperative. Hugby.

说话人 1 26:02
Joe, how do we increase the understanding?

说话人 3 26:05
Well, really, I think it used to be that business people just minded their own business. They have fiduciary obligation to their shareholders and they say, we just kind of stay out of the press, do our own business and that’s it.

说话人 3 26:19
But I think we live in a much more complex geopolitical world where communication is absolutely important. I think businesses from both US and China need to communicate with each other. Without communication, there’s a lot of room for misunderstanding. And if you have misunderstanding then you let the lack of trust accumulate and that could create a lot of conflicts and and so I think it behooves even people in business to travel a lot talk to different communities in different countries and and and share their viewpoints even if you argue with each other I think it’s a good thing communication is so key to increasing understanding and which ultimately leads for trust building and a peaceful world.

说话人 1 27:12
Extremely well said Joe thank you for that Doctor Cheng I’m gonna pivot a little bit because you at TSMC have developed the most sophisticated smallest 3 nanometer chips in Taiwan you shared with us over lunch that in Arizona in the next one or two years, they’re gonna catch up with that ability to develop the smallest most sophisticated chips in the world. Tell us how you think about staying ahead of the curve. How do you continue to do that and have the dominance there? Share with us your vision.

说话人 2 27:50
Well, in the cheapest business, there is a. Eh already so far. There is a preset course for us to follow. And that’s the so called Morse law. It was just a prediction made by Gordon Moore in 1965. He said that the density of a transistors I chip will double every 18 months to double the density every 18 to 18 months to 24 months. You make it, you have to make these changes small all the time and that’s why you know we have made the changes from microns from the size that you could look at under an optical Microsoft to the present size of 2 nanomillimeters 3 nanometers the my goodness you need very high power electron microscopes to look at. Anyway but that cause what has been miraculously effective for the last 50,60 years however, that course looks like it’s near the end also because physically you know well pretty close to atomic size already and you can get smaller than and Adam okay anyway very small where so that causes certain however, there’s another course we can follow that is we even though, even if we can’t make the chips any dancer, we can make them less engine energy consumptive. We can more energy efficient. And that’s the course we are following.

说话人 1 30:16
So I would be remiss if I didn’t ask Doctor Chang and Joe leadership traits because I’m sure we’re all in this room waiting to hear your guidance and your observations on what characteristics young individuals need today to be successful future leaders.

说话人 2 30:35
Well, I think that’s a, they need to first follow in me too, establish a knowledge base. I’m a believer of the so called knowledge pyramid. First you gain information. But if you think about the information that you have enough, then it becomes your own, it becomes knowledge is something that you own really. And then if you think about your large enough, you begin to gain insight and that’s a higher level, that’s another higher level of a, the information pyramid.

说话人 2 31:28
And then you also have to develop this pyramid in different fields because nowadays if you just know a technical field is not enough. We have to know other things. We have to know business strategy, you have to know you even have to know geopolitics. So all these together several pyramids are and each pyramid you give, you build up to a certain level of a competence or a certain level of expertise and then you combine these, you start to have a vision, a viable vision.

说话人 2 32:21
And I, I’m talk about, you’re to, you’re asking me about leaders, right? I think leaders have to do this, get a vision and then, of course, you have to persuade people to follow you. It’s, I think it’s a, as simple as that.

说话人 3 32:48
So fantastic. So I think in order to be a good leader, I’ll say three words, intellect, EQ and humility. Intellect is a combination of attitude and hard work. I didn’t get perfect sat scores, but I try to learn as much as possible on new subjects and things like that. So Doctor Cheng talked about knowledge building. You have to have that basic level of knowledge and intellect in order to get respect from the people that you’re trying to lead. The next thing, EQ, I think you as a leader, you’re leading. What are you leading? You’re not leading machines, you’re leading people. So you need to deal with people. And I think the big, the most important sort of skill set is to convince other people to do things that they don’t wanna do but you want them to do. So you have to have a lot of EQ to do that.

说话人 3 33:44
And finally, humility is very important. I said this many be many times before, so you might have heard you if you get tired, just let me know. But Jack Welch used to say that you have to have the humility to hire people smarter than you are. The, to bring people into the company that is more, are more talented, smarter because Jack Wealth said a people hire other a people, b people hire c people. You have a lot of people, managers that are insecure about themselves. So they end up not hiring very good talent because they feel threatened all the time. Leaders can’t do that. Leaders have to hire people that are smarter than they are. And if they feel like they are, they have to be the smartest person in the room all the time. It’s not a good leader.

说话人 1 34:36
Well, thank you both so much for the pearls of wisdom. I was incredibly insightful and helpful. The pyramid and all of the wonderful comments that you’ve made to Joe and I particularly resonate with the EQ. You don’t hear enough leaders talking about the importance of EQ and humility. So very much resonates. I’m gonna pivot now, Joe, to sports. Thank you. Brooklyn Nets. This is more really. We have the San Diego Seals, the Brooklyn Nets. So what made you foray into sports?

说话人 3 35:09
I actually think this is very interesting. In this country, in America, Asians are not well known to be sports figures, right? Other than Jeremy Lin, I don’t think you can name another Asian athlete in this country. And so I get that question a lot from people like Joe.

说话人 3 35:30
Why are you involved in sports? You’re not supposed to, like the subtexts, you’re not supposed to be involved in sports. Well, I happen to be a very passionate about sports. I was a athlete when I was very young. When I was growing up in Taiwan, we had baseball and dodgeball.

说话人 1 35:51
But did you play? No.

说话人 3 35:53
Not like the movie dodgeball, but. Those who grew up in Taiwan don’t understand exactly what I’m talking about. When I got to the US, I went to an all boy’s boarding school. So the only way I could sort of get people to accept me, accept it into the community was to play a lot of sports because that’s where, that’s how you get respect, not in the classroom. I was better than everyone else in math, but I didn’t get respect that way. I got respect on the football field. I played American football in high school and then I picked up LaCrosse because I was cut from the baseball team. So that’s my background in sports. And getting into the Brooklyn Nets was actually just serendipity. I had never dreamt of growing up to own a sports team, a professional sport team of the magnitude like a team in the NBA. But it just came along as an opportunity the more I looked at it, it basically to own a major professional sports league team in the United States, it’s like owning a rare asset. It’s like owning that Park Avenue apartment, penthouse apartment on Park Avenue. The value is not gonna go down. You’re not gonna make a lot of operating cash flow, but when you do sell it, the value will appreciate most likely. So knowing that economically, I would, my downside was protected. That’s what motivated me to sort of jump in and sort of pursue my passion.

说话人 1 37:32
Wonderful. Well, we have time for just one last question. The time is flown by already, but I’m gonna ask the question to both of you, and we’ll start with you, Doctor Chang. What is one thing that keeps you up at night and what is one thing you’re super optimistic about in the future?

说话人 2 37:51
Well, the one thing that, I don’t think anything keeps me up at night. That’s great. But what comes the closest to keeping me up at night is the first topic that we discuss. This afternoon, I was just decoupling and it looks like people, countries are mad at each other. And that, that worries me. Most optimistic. And I really think that, this country, which is my country, US, United States, it’s still, you know, the hope of the world. That’s in spite of all the problems we’re having. But I think it still is. Yes, sir. A shining example of in the world.

说话人 3 39:13
And Joe, your thought? I, Dutch Chang mentioned Graham Allison 6 years ago. He, after he wrote the book Destin for war, the Thucydides Trap, he went to Beijing and I went to hear him speak. And at the time, the question was, what keeps people up at night? What do you worry about in terms of a hot conflict? What people said, they didn’t say US China, because I was still at the very beginning of the US China conflict. They said North Korea. Correct. And now we’re in the middle of a hot war, 2 hot wars, Russian, Ukraine and Israel, Hamas. It’s so, the world is very dangerous and so unpredictable. That’s the point I’m trying to make. Is it, it, there’s, I worry about these hot conflicts. And I don’t have the answer to how to resolve these conflicts, but they’re very complicated things with his, a lot of history behind it. But that’s what I worry about. And I hope that the two largest economies in the world don’t somehow accidentally or by purpose get into a hot conflict.

说话人 1 40:28
And let’s end on an optimistic note. What are you excited for the future about?

说话人 3 40:32
I, I’m excited about, so I’ve been doing a lot of traveling. Been back in China since covid. I have family in the United States. I, kids that go to school here. I’ve just been to Europe and the Middle East.

说话人 3 40:49
What I’m optimistic about is that generally P speaking, people want peace and stability and an environment for to do business and have prosperity. And these conflicts, I know that there’s a lot of extremism out there. I mean, we should do everything to try to stamp out extremist elements. But I still believe 99% of the people around the world our peace loving and want to have prosperity for everybody, not just for only for themselves.

说话人 1 41:24
Ladies and gentlemen, the extraordinary Doctor Morris Chang and Joe CAI. Let’s give him a round of applause. Thank you both so much for being thank you all for attending. Thank you very much.

说话人 2 41:36
Thank you.