As retail investors turn more attention to Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and SK hynix (000660.KS), publishers have been rolling out one semiconductor book after another. Critics say many of them are riding the market's interest, making it hard for general readers to tell which titles offer substance.
"Map of Semiconductor Hegemony" sets itself apart by surveying the state of the chip industry through the reporting of Nihon Keizai Shimbun specialists stationed at key semiconductor hubs around the world. Nihon Keizai, Japan's largest business daily, is also widely known for the Nikkei 225, the benchmark stock index it compiles. The book draws on the observations of reporters working in Silicon Valley, Taipei, Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo, capturing industry trends, national strategies and corporate maneuvering in vivid detail.
The book's greatest strength is the way it examines major events and shifts in the global chip industry from the vantage point of reporters on the ground. It devotes considerable space, for example, to the wave of pessimism in the United States last September that artificial intelligence investment had become a bubble, following the $100 billion partnership between Nvidia and OpenAI. Under the arrangement, Nvidia invests up to $100 billion in OpenAI, which then uses the money to buy Nvidia chips — a structure that touched off debate over circular dealing. Paul Lu Carvan, a senior fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School, criticized the practice, saying such circular deals echo the dot-com bubble era, when companies financed one another and inflated their own growth.
For Taiwan's TSMC, the book identifies the island's "five shortages" as the pressing challenge: electricity, water, land, factory workers and highly skilled talent. Minghsin University of Science and Technology, nicknamed the "mini TSMC," draws a notably high share of its students from Vietnam — a stark illustration of how Taiwan, facing a shrinking population, is turning to foreign talent to staff its chip industry. The reporters also capture Taiwan's power shortage in immediate terms, tracing how the island reached "zero nuclear" in 2025 after the Democratic Progressive Party government took office in 2016 on a pledge to phase out atomic energy.
Korean readers will naturally be drawn to how foreign correspondents assess Samsung Electronics and SK hynix. In its treatment of Korean chipmakers, the book examines how the political shift that followed former President Yoon Suk-yeol's impeachment has affected the industry. Industrial policy in Korea is often driven by the government, the authors write, and conglomerates have expanded investment in response to government demands. When power changes hands, they add, the direction of policy and legislation can change with it, leaving some uncertainty over whether plans to build chip fabrication complexes — projects that run on 10-year horizons — will proceed smoothly.
The book attributes Samsung's lag in the race to develop advanced chips for AI to a lack of foresight among its executives and to the nine years of legal jeopardy surrounding Chairman Jay Y. Lee. Its diagnosis is a pointed one: at the very moment the company needed to remake its business portfolio through bold mergers and acquisitions, the absence of a final decision-maker gradually eroded Samsung's competitiveness, as legal risk left management reluctant to act.
Behind SK hynix's standing in high-bandwidth memory, the book points to Chairman Chey Tae-won's leadership and a corporate culture that puts engineers at the center. It credits the company's flat culture, which values technical merit and evidence over rank: even a proposal the leadership has already rejected can get a second look if the person responsible returns with fresh data and test results.
The book pays particular attention to the risk of oversupply created by national drives for semiconductor self-sufficiency. Governments that suffered supply-chain disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic six years ago are now competing to build chip plants of their own. The book labels this phenomenon a "state-engineered downturn" and sounds an alarm. If the industry keeps charging ahead on this course, it warns, the chip business could slide into a state-engineered downturn in which many companies fail to turn a profit — and it will not take long before the limits of the state intervention now reshaping the global industry come into view.
The prevailing view in the market is that high-value DRAM such as HBM, the mainstay of Korean chipmakers, will be less exposed to a glut. But the authors' warning deserves a hearing: if a wave of state-engineered downturn arrives on the back of worldwide overproduction, no corner of the industry will be safe. 392 pages, 23,000 won.
