Stefan Mileschin

Samsung is taking a page out of the Chinese communist playbook, as it apparently wants to kill Taiwanese competitors like Hon Hai and TSMC.

According to Business Today magazine, Samsung's top policy makers decided to adopt the "kill Taiwan" strategy after the 2008 crisis. The two prime targets for Samsung's onslaught are TSMC, the world's largest foundry for hire, and Hon Hai, which is basically the name Foxconn uses when it doesn't want people to talk about overworked workers leaping to their deaths from sweatshop dorms.

An industry expert told Focus Taiwan that going after Hon Hai doesn't make much sense, as the company is not in direct competition with Samsung. In fact, the two companies could even step up their cooperation this year. In some circles Samsung's decision to invest in Sharp is viewed as an effort to undermine Taiwanese hardware makers, by creating a new axis of evil which would include Samsung, Sharp and Hon Hai.

Hon Hai was apparently aware of the Sharp deal ahead of time, but did not wish to comment, and neither did TSMC. In fact, TSMC seems more at risk than Hon Hai, as Samsung is aggressively expanding its contract chip manufacturing business.

Coincidentally, Hon Hai and Sharp are Apple partners and TSMC is also expected to land an order from Apple to build next generation A-series application processors.

http://news.techeye.net/business/sam...to-kill-taiwan