Firms try strategic alliances to secure global market competitiveness and to complement limited internal resources. The alliances between/among countries and companies reduce costs for market entry and new technology development. The semiconductor industry, in particular memory business field, requires large-scale investment to secure and maintain market competitiveness. On the other hand, non-memory business field is a high value-added industry to require mass customized products, and has bigger sized market than the memory business. The semiconductor industry has shown active strategic alliances for co-development of the next generation product, product standardization, marketing and capital financing.
It has become an urgent request for Korea to switch from heavily sloped memory business to non-memory one as a balanced corporate business strategy toward the future. As part of the solution for this, domestic foundry is asked to be established for the nurturing of semiconductor design firms largely focusing on small & medium sized companies. Non-memory design firms of Taiwan have been growing since 1970s with ample funds and Taiwanese government’s support policy for electronics industry. She has shown strong non-memory business competitiveness based on foundry strength. In addition to this, she has been rapidly catching Korea up in DRAM memory business with imported technologies from Japan.
This thesis tries to analyze the development process of Taiwanese semiconductor industry and active strategic alliances between/among domestic & international companies, and then to propose the justification for the strategic alliance between Korean and Taiwanese semiconductor firms.