Hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese companies, including contract electronics manufacturers, are moving away from China over trade tensions and rising costs
Context & Ripple Effects
This exit wave is the downstream result of the US campaign to cut China out of supply chains, which by late 2020 had already pushed Apple to weigh moving 15%–30% of its output out of the country. The scale matters because it unwinds the very interdependence that made Taiwan central to electronics in the first place — the deep Taiwan–China–US entanglement documented in earlier coverage.
First-order effects
- Contract manufacturers like Foxconn face a dual squeeze: relocating production out of China while their own shares take tariff-driven hits, as seen when TSMC and Foxconn closed down roughly 10% on April 7 under the US' 32% tariff on Taiwan.
Second-order effects
- Rival relocation destinations capture the flow — at least nine Taiwanese chip firms have set up or expanded operations in Japan over two years as decoupling accelerates — while China responds by hardening its domestic base, including an undocumented rule requiring chipmakers to use at least 50% domestically made equipment for new capacity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, supply chains reorganize from one integrated China hub into parallel blocs: Taiwan builds local supplier ecosystems around its chipmakers, Japan absorbs displaced capacity, and the US pursues self-sufficiency from Taiwanese chips — with export controls increasingly exposed to workarounds like China retrofitting older ASML DUV machines.
The trend: Electronics manufacturing is splitting along geopolitical lines, with Taiwanese firms diversifying out of China into Japan and domestic ecosystems while both Washington and Beijing push toward self-sufficient supply chains.