Dr. Morris Chang

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200 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Jan 2025

Dr. Morris Chang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Acquired · TSMC Founder Morris Chang · 26 Jan 2025 podcast
But we almost never really fired people even after the probation period.
That's right, yeah. And I actually have told the managers that. And well, in 2008, Of course, there was a financial crisis. And the semiconductor business, in fact, got affected. And our revenue dropped. Our business dropped pretty seriously. I was not a CEO. I was the chairman. But I just knew that anyone...
Any general manager, any CEO, general manager, without very much experience, what he or she would do in a situation like that. It's kind of a knee-jerk kind of reaction. Oh, he says, oh, this is my test. I got to save all the money possible. And I got to, you know, lay off people, you know.
Well, I know, I know. Well, semiconductor industry. But semiconductor industry people actually think the same way as I described, you know what I mean? They all lay off. They all lay off people, too. I had a lot of experience at Texas Instruments Center. But at Texas Instruments, I was not a CEO. I was just one of the top managers under the CEO level.
And when the company decided to have a layoff, the CEO conferred with the top managers, who included me. And their first reaction was exactly the same. And I'm talking about the company early 70s, their first reaction on who to lay off was exactly the same as what our TSM CCO did in late 2008, 2009, which was, you know, go by performance. Well, now I was the only one at Texas Instruments
in the early 70s that said, no, that would not be a credible way of doing it. People would not respect us if we lay off by performance ratings. And why is that? Because it's very subjective. Performance reviews... The performance ratings are done by everyone's own supervisor. So 700 worst performing people in the company. And who gave the 700 people the bad ratings? 700 supervisors, you know.
Very subjective. It's not something that people will respect. If in a year you have to hire people back and you have to hire the laid off people back, then you shouldn't lay off. Because the lay off, the separation expense is usually half a year, about half a year. And it takes at least half a year to train a person. So if you need the people back, Within a year, you shouldn't lay off.
You mean customer issue being NVIDIA? Yeah. Well, to finish the employment issue, they laid off employees. As I said, there were 700 of them, 600 or 700 of them. came to my home to demonstrate and protest. Now, the company, TSMC, was pre-warned that hundreds of people would appear in front of my home. So they notified the police department in my district. So the police department said,
50, 60 police officers to try to maintain the order. Now, more than 100 protesters appeared. And the neighbors, my neighbors, you know, they had trouble getting in and out. That was only the first time. A month or so later, the problem was still not solved. I was still not the CEO. So they appeared again. Some were protesters.
About 25 of them decided to spend the night, sleep over in the little park that's about a block away from my home. My wife literally didn't sleep that night, you know. She would wake up and went over to that window to take a look to see what was going on. But then, very early the next morning, my wife, six o'clock the next morning, my wife, you know, got up and she took one of the
bodyguards, and went to a neighborhood market and got the Chinese-style breakfast. Chinese bread, you know, fried bread, you know. I don't know whether you ever had it or not. Probably not. Yeah, yeah. Buns, you know, soybean milk. And take enough of that breakfast, enough for 25, 30 people. And back to the park and distribute them to the protesters. And they were thankful, you know. Yeah.
And they actually decided to not go to the president's palace, president's mansion. And they told my wife that they would not do that that day. And all this kind of precipitated my taking back the CEO job. Well, there's another thing. I told the previous CEO before he laid off the 600, 700 people.
I said, if you, because I knew, as I said, I knew that it would be his knee-jerk reaction to confront a crisis such as the crisis we had It would be his knee-jerk reaction to lay off. So I said to him, if you want to lay off, bring her to the board. I'll call a special board meeting. And I knew what I would ask the board to do, which was not to grant the permission.
But he decided to circumvent that, the CEO, because he What he did, he did not consider it to be layoff. It was just punishment for the poor performers. Well, as far as the CEO is concerned, I did keep him. I had more than one nice talk with him. I intended to, and I told him that he was still a potential successor to me.
So I kept him at the same job grade, we have job grades, and the same salary and bonus. But he was now the president of new businesses. And back then, you know, we had high hopes for the so-called new businesses, which was solar cells, and LED.
Ended up the biggest marketing, biggest market opportunity. Why is it so ironic?
I know. And I knew that. I did not really mean, I did not really think that solar or LED would really replace our integrated circuits business. But I knew the integrated circuits business was going to be great, you know. But at that time, which was 2009, at that time, we also thought that solar and LED was going to be very promising. But it didn't work out, of course.
The solar business could have been pretty good, however, China ruined it. They subsidized the hell out of it. And they now control that business, solar cells. the prices were extremely low, still low, still low. So it didn't take off. TSMC service didn't take off. And LED did not take off either because LED, it's not, the market is not as big as solar. However, it's controlled the patents.
are controlled by just a few companies. And they wouldn't let the few companies that control the patents of LED would not let up at all. So a few years later, the CEO that was put on the new businesses decided that his new assignment wasn't working out either, so he quit.
He is now a vice chairman and the CEO of MediaTek, yeah.
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