Visiting the most important company in the world

“IF CHINA takes Taiwan, they will turn the world off, potentially,” Donald Trump told Fox News recently, apparently referring to a potential seizure of one company that is central to, well, pretty much everything. Indeed, it’s arguably the most important company in the world.

The company Trump alluded to – Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC – is the only corporation I can think of in history that could cause a global depression if it were forced to halt production.

These days it seems impossible to have a conversation about geopolitics or economics without coming back to TSMC, which makes about 90 per cent of the world’s most advanced chips. If the lights went out in Hsinchu, Taiwan, in the company’s ultra-clean and ultra-secure buildings, you might not be able to buy a new phone, car or watch. Armies could run out of precision-guided missiles and hospitals could struggle to replace advanced X-ray and MRI machines. It might be like the Covid-19 supply-chain chip disruption – times 10 – and TSMC, unfortunately, is situated in a region where war is possible and could threaten production.