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US President Joe Biden holds up a silicon wafer while speaking during the virtual CEO Summit on Semiconductor and Supply Chain Resilience from the White House, April 12, 2021. (AP/Yonhap News)

On the eve of the Nov. 8 deadline for providing the US Commerce Department with information it had requested about semiconductor supply chains, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) and other major chipmakers hurried to submit the relevant information. But because they reportedly didn’t submit most of the sensitive information requested, some predict the US will make additional requests for data.

According to Regulations.gov, a US federal website that solicits public opinion about government regulations, a total of 23 global firms and universities had handed over their data by Nov. 8. That list includes TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor foundry; Micron Technology Inc., an American chipmaker that has the world’s third-biggest market share of DRAM chips; and Tower Semiconductor Ltd., an Israeli foundry.

These companies apparently omitted sensitive data — such as information about their major clients — from their submissions. Tower Semiconductor posted two spreadsheets to its website for public viewing. The spreadsheets include such information as process nodes for its products and the average manufacturing lead time for each process. But the company did not name its top three clients by sales, commenting that it can’t disclose such information given its listing on the Nasdaq. It also cited non-disclosure agreements in declining to provide information about the locations of its clients’ post-processing facilities.

The data that Micron Technology submitted to the Commerce Department isn’t open to the public. TSMC turned in a publicly accessible file that was almost entirely blank, along with confidential documents.

However, Taiwan-based United Daily News reported on Monday that TSMC submitted the most detailed data of any of the 23 firms and universities and noted that vehicle chips represented 3%-4% of the company’s total sales over the past two years. That report suggests that the chipmaker provided the Commerce Department with a breakdown of its sales by product category, rather than chip sales per client as requested.

That has triggered speculation that the data the chipmakers have submitted thus far won’t satisfy the Commerce Department and will thus prompt further requests for information or other follow-up measures.

“Whether or not we have to use compulsory measures [for getting the data] depends on how many companies engage and the quality of the data shared,” Reuters quoted a department spokesperson as saying on Oct. 21.

“Companies who provided their data openly would only have included what already appears in their investor relations materials, and even data submitted confidentially was probably not concrete,” said Kim Yang-paeng, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade.

“The companies won’t feel the need to preemptively release all [their data] until they know what sanctions the US has in mind. If the US government decides that the current data is insufficient, it’s likely to ask for more [after the Nov. 8 submission deadline].”

Companies that hadn’t submitted their data by Monday included SK Hynix Inc., Intel Corp., General Motors Co., and Infineon Technologies AG, which had agreed to cooperate with the Commerce Department, as well as Samsung Electronics Co. These companies are expected to submit a level of data similar to those who have already reported figures to the US.

By Sun Dam-eun, staff reporter

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