Taiwan is the world's largest producer of motherboards, monitors and modems. In 1994, it turned out 7.4 million motherboards - the main printed circuit boards in computers - while producing 12.7 million monitors domestically and another 4 million in Taiwanese factories abroad. It holds a 55% global market share in modems. But it is the manner in which it has achieved this status that is as impressive as the numbers themselves.
Computers and consumer electronics items traditionally have been made by large, vertically integrated conglomerates that produce most of the component parts in-house. Samsung of Korea is a typical example. But such huge manufacturing structures as the Korean chaebol and the Japanese keiretsu fit uneasily with Taiwan's Chinese society. The Taiwanese, have disaggregated the production process, permitting much greater flexibility in production. While in many areas of industry this can be a severe disadvantage, in electronics it has benefits.
The structure has reached its apogee in Taiwan in the manufacture of integrated circuits (ICs), commonly known as computer chips. This process can be split into four main stages: design, when the circuits for the chips are created; fabrication, when the circuits are etched with lasers onto wafers of silicon; packaging, when the individual dies are cut from the wafers and set into gold-leaf boards, attached to outside connecting pins and bound in a resin or ceramic; and testing, when the packaged chips are tested before being sent to the end-user.