electronics industry

The electronics industry consists of various sectors. The central driving force behind the entire electronics industry is the semiconductor industry sector,^[33] which has annual sales of over $481 billion as of 2018.^[34] The largest industry sector is e-commerce, which generated over $29 trillion in 2017.^[35] The most widely manufactured electronic device is the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), with an estimated 13 sextillion MOSFETs having been manufactured between 1960 and 2018.^[36] In the 1960s, U.S. manufacturers were unable to compete with Japanese companies such as Sony and Hitachi who could produce high-quality goods at lower prices. By the 1980s, however, U.S. manufacturers became the world leaders in semiconductor development and assembly.^[37]

However, during the 1990s and subsequently, the industry shifted overwhelmingly to East Asia (a process begun with the initial movement of microchip mass-production there in the 1970s), as plentiful, cheap labor, and increasing technological sophistication, became widely available there.^[38][39]

Over three decades, the United States' global share of semiconductor manufacturing capacity fell, from 37% in 1990, to 12% in 2022.^[39] America's pre-eminent semiconductor manufacturer, Intel Corporation, fell far behind its subcontractor Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in manufacturing technology.^[38]

By that time, Taiwan had become the world's leading source of advanced semiconductors^[39][38]—followed by South Korea, the United States, Japan, Singapore, and China.^[39][38]

Important semiconductor industry facilities (which often are subsidiaries of a leading producer based elsewhere) also exist in Europe (notably the Netherlands), Southeast Asia, South America, and Israel.^[38]