Kanish Chugh

Ganesh, welcome back to the podcast, mate.

It's always a pleasure.

Today, we're going to talk about a really popular ETF that you and the team at ETF Securities have just launched, which is the Semi ETF, as most people know it.

Investing in and around the semiconductor industry, it's a really interesting one, particularly coming out of the COVID pandemic.

We see supply chain bottlenecks, lots of delays on people's favorite products, whether it's an iPad,

or whether it's something for a car or anything basically electrical, people are thinking, when am I going to get this thing delivered?

Most of us blame Australia Post, but sometimes it's other things that are impacting the supply chain way back kind of at the, I guess, the fulcrum of the internet technologies and just technologies, generally speaking.

And that is kind of in this microchip and semiconductor space.

So let's just kick things off.

Tell us a little bit about Sebi Conductors, what they are, the industry, and basically like what are the key kind of dynamics in this industry?

Yeah, I think we talked about ASML recently, you and I. Just to put it in context for people, sometimes the leading edge of microchips and semiconductors is around three nanometers.

So that is, you wouldn't even see it.

And that's why if dust gets into these environments, into these clean rooms, the dust can be like a major, it can actually be bigger than the actual semiconductor, the transistor itself.

So it's actually a really interesting scale when you put it like that.

And on the other end, we go from tiny to huge, it can cost tens of billions of dollars to get one of these foundries up and running.

And even if you do get it up and running, which China is finding out at the moment,

you could be five years behind by the time it's built.

And so, you know, and then there's no guarantee that you're going to be at the leading edge of that.

And I think that's, that's a really interesting thing too, because basically it's like economies of scale.

So these incumbents are so big that they're basically kind of edged out a market for themselves.