During DIGITIMES' 25th Anniversary ceremony, the company premiered a self-produced documentary film, Silicon Island Chronicles and Beyond, covering the history of Taiwan's IT industry. The film will come as a five-part series and be broadcasted on DIGITIMES' Youtube channel, enabling their viewers to discover Taiwan's pivotal role as a semiconductor shield and its remarkable growth story in the global tech industry.
In the film, DIGITIMES invited several tech leaders including DIGITIMES chairman Colley Hwang, Acer founder Stan Shih, Lite-On founder Raymond Soong, and Etron Technology chairman Dr. Nicky Lu, as well as scholars from top-tier institutes such as Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), to describe their experiences during the challenging early days of the nation's most famous industry.
After the premiere of the documentary, Hwang and Lu were invited on stage to talk about how Taiwan's IT industry has evolved in the past half of a century. Hwang pointed out that Taiwan has not had a national-level semiconductor policy for a long time, and is now in dire need of one with the geopolitical tensions that Taiwan is experiencing at the moment.
Lu said that although Taiwan's IT industry experienced some failures in businesses such as panels and DRAM, new opportunities such as man-collaborative machines have already emerged and he expects more applications are still waiting to be developed by Taiwan's IT companies.
Jay Shen, Assistant General Manager of Garmin Taiwan's automotive business, was also invited on stage with him pointing out that the automotive industry now contributes around 8% of many countries' GDPs. With the arrival of the EV era, Taiwan, which has an advantage in IT, will certainly find a good cut-in point as rising demand from automakers for more computing capability will translate to more orders for semiconductors.
