Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will meet with major semiconductor companies' executives among the Group of Seven delegations visiting Japan this week and call for more investment in the country, the top government spokesman said Wednesday.
Kishida will hold the meeting at his office on Thursday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said at a news conference. Participants will likely include executives from IBM Corp., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Samsung Electronics Co. and imec, a Belgium-based research and development institution, according to sources close to the matter.
The executives are visiting Japan as the country hosts the G-7 summit in Hiroshima from Friday. Strengthening semiconductor supply chains and other materials critical to global economic activities is expected to be among the summit's key agenda items.
"It is extremely important to work together with like-minded countries and regions as making resilient semiconductor supply chains cannot be achieved by a single country," Matsuno said.
Japanese chip manufacturers were once dominant players in the industry in the 1980s but now lag behind leading companies from Taiwan and South Korea.
Tokyo wants to build a globally competitive chip-making industry again by promoting collaboration between overseas industry leaders and domestic companies. Japan still has companies that lead in chip-making processes and producing key chip materials.
As part of efforts to secure a stable production of domestic chips, the government is providing subsidies for the construction of a chip plant in southwestern Japan by Taiwan's TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, and to a new domestic chipmaker, Rapidus Corp., established by Toyota Motor Corp., Sony Group Corp. and six other companies last year.
