Speaker unverified: commitment

Transcript context

…Is this common, by the way? It seems like it would be in a customer’s interest to come to you and say, I need to buy zillions of chips from you. I need all your wafers, because they have no skin in the game of you spending all the money. I know. Well, back in the 90s, in the first (let’s say) 10, 12, 15 years of our existence, we were short of capacity almost all the time. What you just said happened all the time. We figure out that we will require a deposit from the customer, and we will even confiscate the deposit if the time comes for him to take the waivers and he doesn’t. Everybody belies in the word ‘confiscate.’ It was first used by me. I told the salespeople in San Jose, tell the customer that we need a deposit from them, because, just as you said, it’s our money and it’s only their words. They may not want the wafers when the time comes. And I told the salesman, tell the customer we will confiscate the deposit. Ah, the salesman never heard anything like that before. They were in an uproar [...] happiness and all. Now they could actually stand up and tell the customer that we might even confiscate your money. But of course, really we never confiscated any money. Now, it did happen quite often particularly in the 2000. We had (I think) it was called the Internet recession. Because on the Internet, people were starting companies called pets.com or something. Anyway, we had the recession. Which trickled all the way back to semiconductors. TSMC’s revenues was four years after the dot-com bubble before they were back at the—…

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