| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 高階經營管理碩士在職專班 === 106 === As the development of Semiconductor industry and the changes of industrial demands move fast, Semiconductor equipment suppliers have to continue building core competence in order to keep their business advantage and long term sustainability. Managing core competence of each firm or product usually associate with their technology, quality or operational efficiency related. For instance, ASML continue developing the most advanced Lithography Pattern scanning technology and dominate the EUV (Extreme Ultra-Violet) and ArF Emersion market, while KLA-Tencor continue becoming the leader of Inspection and Metrology technologies due to their dedication and technology advantage in this market.
There are several major segment involve in the semiconductor industry, for instance, Designing houses, Equipment and Materials suppliers, Wafer manufacturing Fabrications, Assembly and Testing houses, and the users. These parties are sharing the market, profit and responsibility within this value chain of semiconductor industry. In the past 20 years a trend was observed that the key suppliers keep acquiring/merging others who own potential advanced technologies that can be adopted into the need of next generation or a niche market. This strategy also leads the suppliers to be able to offer a “Total solution” to the wafer manufacturers. In other words, this is a significantly effective strategy so called “Diversification”.
However, we also observed that some firms were trying to diversify their business model by extending from core technology but somehow were unsuccessful. Several reasons can explain why but mainly due to the new technology being developed wasn’t strongly correlated to their core competence, the resources of business unit wasn’t sufficient, or the technology wasn’t a right forget for these to make such diversification at that moment. The consequence of making inappropriate decision to diversify may usually generate risk to their core competence which makes impact to their business position in the market, and even losing the market as the worst scenario.
Making appropriate decision for either continue focusing on the core competence or start diversifying their business scope into similar/different market is critical which has to be comprehensively evaluated. This thesis is subject to study the model of implementing Core Competence of firm to achieve the goal of appropriate diversification at the right time, by using the Unison Decision Framework. Empirical studies of two top-5 Semiconductor Inspection and Metrology Equipment Suppliers (Company R & Company C) were conducted for validation to investigate how their strategic decisions were made to achieve the goals, no matter Focusing on their core competence or making diversification. A recommendation was made for these two firms whether there were strategic steps made in inappropriate direction or timing, and what strategy they could consider to make to approach a better business outcome back to the moment. This thesis concludes with discussions of research contributions, research constraints and future research directions.
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