US sanctions will not halt rise of China’s chip industry

on 23/06/2023

While China’s semiconductor capabilities in no way compare to those of Taiwan, the Netherlands or the U.S. at present, it is hardly starting from ground zero.
Since the start of Beijing’s Made in China 2025 initiative in 2015, Chinese companies have made varying degrees of headway across the semiconductor ecosystem. At this point, it seems likely that China will slip its U.S. chokehold in short order, with its chip industry eventually emerging little worse for wear.
Chinese companies today represent 20% of the world’s fabless chip design houses and 10% of the overall global chipmaking capacity, according to the Brookings Institution. China’s 9% share of 2020 global chip sales, according to Semiconductor Industry Association data, placed it ahead of Taiwan and just behind the 10% captured by both the EU and Japan.
The controls the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden announced last October would apply to technologies to make what are known as 14 nanometer or 16 nm chips, as well as more advanced chips, which are referenced by even shorter lengths. The intention is to restrain China’s advances in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and ballistic missile development.
But there are signs that China could already be well on its way to producing sub-14 nm chips. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), China’s largest contract chip producer, last year appeared to successfully produce 7 nm chips although a lack of detail regarding the breakthrough has led to questions about whether the production is commercially sustainable.
SMIC is not the only Chinese company claiming such feats. Huawei Technologies, which has been subject to the most intense U.S. restrictions, late last year filed for a patent for lithographic technology, which is critical for producing advanced chips.
If budgets were the key measure of success, then China would probably be in first place. Under the CHIPS and Science Act, passed last year, the U.S. is funneling $52.7 billion into building, modernizing and expanding domestic chip production. The EU is mulling a plan to invest $46 billion.
But even combined, these amounts pale in comparison to the 1 trillion yuan ($146 billion) package that China is said to be preparing.
To get CHIPS Act aid, companies will need to meet a host of conditions, including, crucially, not expanding semiconductor capacity in “foreign countries of concern for 10 years” and also must not “knowingly engage in any joint research technology licensing effort with a foreign entity of concern that involves sensitive technologies or products.”
The key country of concern, of course, is China. The Biden administration, in effect, is asking companies to choose between the world’s two biggest economies.
Most chip producers have been heavily involved in China for many years. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics, for instance, have been investing billions of dollars in their factories in China.
Despite support from U.S. President Joe Biden, in tie, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will find it challenging to build a vertically integrated semiconductor ecosystem for its new factory in the state of Arizona. © Reuters
When Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, visited Taiwan last year, Morris Chang, TSMC’s founder and former chairman, is said to have told her that Washington’s efforts to become a semiconductor powerhouse are naive and doomed to fail.
Chang may have been referring to the complexities of building a vertically integrated semiconductor ecosystem by 2024, when TSMC’s first factory in the state of Arizona is scheduled for completion. It has taken TSMC over 30 years to foster, nurture, and trust its 2,500-odd top-tier suppliers and more than 10,000 secondary suppliers, many of which are based in China.
The notoriously difficult supply chain for chipmaking may work in China’s favor.
Chipmaking entails coordinating myriad unrelated resources and advanced technologies including raw silicon ingots and rare earth metals from China and neon gas from Ukraine, along with specialty chemicals, processing and testing tools, lasers, vacuum sealers and power supplies from all corners of the world.
Combined, the logistical hoops make the Arizona plant’s planned 2024 start date a flat-out impossibility.
Moreover, export controls will not affect China’s 30-year head start in nurturing its stockpile of rare earth metals, skilled chip designers and engineers, and thousands of indigenous suppliers.
Though still behind the world leaders in chip technology, China has proved over time that it can turn fledging industries — whether in high-speed rail, telecommunications, electric vehicles or social media — into juggernauts.
If the U.S. sanctions on Huawei are an indication of the future, then Biden’s chip controls are doomed to fail. The Trump administration in 2020 banned companies from supplying Huawei with custom chips using American software or hardware.
This virtually wiped out Huawei’s once-dominant position in the world’s handset market. Many wrote Huawei off as dead, but it has hardly disappeared. It remains the world’s largest provider of telecommunications equipment while also developing new lines of business, such as creating artificial intelligence applications for governments, phone companies and other businesses.
Biden’s sanctions more than likely will follow a similar path toward obsolescence. The embargo, while seemingly onerous, gives an undeterred Beijing the impetus to garner homegrown technological know-how, muster hundreds of billions of dollars and cultivate a supply chain to catapult an underrated semiconductor ecosystem to new heights.
In the end, the new sanctions are just too little, too late to stop China’s momentum.

Balochistan varsity in financial crisis, JAC demands release of funds

on 23/06/2023

Joint Action Committee, Balochistan University, Teachers, Officers and Employees Association has demanded of the authorities to release Rs1.11 billion by June 2023 to pull the University of Balochistan out of financial crisis and constitute a committee headed by Minister for Finance, Balochistan by giving representation to all the stakeholders of the university.
These demands were made by Professor Fareed Khan Achakzai and Shah Ali Bughti, leaders of the Joint Action Committee, Balochistan University, Teachers, Officers, and Employees Association while addressing a press conference at Quetta Press Club this week.
They said the incumbent Vice Chancellor, the University of Balochistan, had been posted against merit; resultantly, the university had been facing severe educational, economic, and administrative problems owing to the flawed policies of the Vice Chancellor.
They said that academicians, officers, and employees of the university had not been paid their monthly salaries for the last three months. They said that they were on strike for the last one and half months, demanding the authorities get their monthly salaries released, but the concerned authorities were not paying heed to their demand.
They called on the authorities to release an amount of Rs1.11 billion by June 2023 in order to pull University out of financial crises and constitute a committee headed by the Minister for Finance Balochistan by giving representation to all the stakeholders of the university.

A Future with Bioengineering: UIT University Hosts National Symposium

on 23/06/2023

UIT University organized a one-day Symposium on Saturday 29th April, In the symposium guest speakers highlighted the recent developments in Genetic and Bio-engineering that are likely to bring drastic changes to society in the near future, much like how computer technology has transformed the world.
The symposium brings together scientists, technologists, educationalists, students, and entrepreneurs to deliberate some of the amazing challenges and opportunities that are being unfolded with “Gene-editing”, “Synthetic biology” and “Engineering with biology”.
The First National Symposium on Bio-Engineering, a full-day event with 18 distinguished speakers with foreign training, leading the discussions, covered application areas such as Agriculture, Health Sciences, and Engineering Materials. Educationalists proposed steps needed to introduce the subject at the school and college level, whereas business leaders were invited to explore economic opportunities for new startups and businesses.
While addressing the symposium Chancellor of UIT University Mr. Hussain Hasham said that the World is changing very fast with new technologies that’s why UIT University is thinking about immerging in the new field of BioScience, Biotechnology, and bio Engineering.
Sameer Hoodbhoy, Parvez Hoodbhoy, Dr. Athar Asama, Dr. Zahra Hasan, Dr. Shahpar Mirza, and Dr. Stephen Lyone were the guests at the symposium.

Business Ready replaces Doing Business project World Bank launches new business climate model

on 23/06/2023

The World Bank Group has begun work to assess the business and investment climate in up to 180 economies under its flagship Business Ready project—a key instrument of its new strategy to facilitate private investment, generate employment, and improve productivity to help countries accelerate development in inclusive and sustainable ways, the bank statement on its website says.
It merits mentioning that this has come after embarrassing revelations of data irregularities and favouritism towards China forced it to cancel its flagship rankings two years ago.
Business Ready improves upon and replaces the World Bank Group’s earlier Doing Business project, says the bank.
It reflects a more balanced and transparent approach toward evaluating a country’s business and investment climate—one that has been shaped by recommendations from experts from within and outside the World Bank Group, including governments, the private sector, and civil society organizations. The first annual Business Ready report, covering 54 economies, will be published in the Spring of 2024.
The World Bank Group has published two key documents: the Business Ready Manual and Guide, specifying the detailed protocols and safeguards it has put in place to ensure the integrity of the assessments; and the Business Ready Methodology Handbook, detailing the project’s indicators and scoring methodology. Data collection on the business environment of the initial 54 economies is being done through extensive consultations with regulatory experts and nationally representative World Bank Enterprise Surveys, collected by competitively selected survey companies.
“The World Bank Group is bringing back a fuller and sharper measure of the investment climate of countries—something that is badly needed in a global economy in the midst of a generalized slowdown,” said Indermit Gill, the World Bank Group’s Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. “Governments that do more to make their economies business-ready will do better in reviving private investment, creating jobs, and quickening the transition to cleaner energy.”
The World Bank Group has long been a leader in spurring business-regulatory reforms across the world. Its assessments of the business-enabling environment worldwide helped spur nearly 4,000 regulatory reforms in developing and developed economies over the past two decades. They also significantly advanced academic research in this area, resulting in 4,000 peer-reviewed research papers and at least 10,000 working papers. Countries, moreover, often use these assessments to shape their development strategies.
“The ‘Business Ready’ project represents a new approach to assessing the business and investment climates,” said Norman Loayza, Director of the World Bank’s Indicators Group, which leads the project. “The ‘Business Ready’ approach aims to establish a better balance between the ease of conducting a business and the broader implications for society as a whole. It gives a more positive role for governments, advocating for better public services for businesses. In addition to experts’ assessments, it includes direct information from entrepreneurs and managers on their experience navigating the economy’s business environment.”
Business Ready focuses on 10 topics covering the lifecycle of a firm in the course of starting, operating, or closing or reorganizing its activities: Business Entry, Business Location, Utility Services, Labor, Financial Services, International Trade, Taxation, Dispute Resolution, Market Competition, and Business Insolvency. Over the next three years, the project will grow to cover about 180 economies worldwide annually, starting with 54 economies in 2023-24, 120 economies in 2024-25, and reaching 180 economies in 2025-26.
The project’s objective is reflected in its name—to make each country’s economic environment ready for a dynamic private sector. The name highlights the fact that economies exist in different stages of readiness, and that governments play a key role in creating a business environment that is conducive for sustainable development.
Transparency will be a key feature of Business Ready’s safeguards for data integrity. All information collected by the project—raw granular data, scores, as well as the calculations used to obtain the scores—will be made publicly available on the project website. Moreover, all results presented in the reports will be replicable using straightforward toolkits available on the website.

Over 75 pc of companies look to adopt latest technologies in next 5 years 14 million people will loose jobs in next five years, WEF Future of Jobs Report says

on 23/06/2023

Economic, health and geopolitical trends have created divergent outcomes for labour markets globally in 2023. While tight labour markets are prevalent in high-income countries, low- and lower-middle-income countries continue to see higher unemployment than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
On an individual level, labour-market outcomes are also diverging, as workers with only basic education and women face lower employment levels. At the same time, real wages are declining as a result of an ongoing cost-of living crisis, and changing worker expectations and concerns about the quality of work are becoming more prominent issues globally.
The fourth edition of the Survey has the widest coverage thus far by topic, geography and sector. The Future of Jobs Survey brings together the perspective of 803 companies – collectively employing more than 11.3 million workers – across 27 industry clusters and 45 economies from all world regions.
The Survey covers questions of macrotrends and technology trends, their impact on jobs, their impact on skills, and the workforce transformation strategies businesses plan to use, across the 2023-2027 timeframe.
Technology adoption will remain a key driver of business transformation in the next five years. Over 85% of organizations surveyed identify increased adoption of new and frontier technologies and broadening digital access as the trends most likely to drive transformation in their organization. Broader application of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards within their organizations will also have a significant impact.
The next most-impactful trends are macroeconomic: the rising cost of living and slow economic growth. The impact of investments to drive the green transition was judged to be the sixth-most impactful macro trend, followed by supply shortages and consumer expectations around social and environmental issues.
Though still expected to drive the transformation of almost half of companies in the next five years, the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, increased geopolitical divisions and demographic dividends in developing and emerging economies were ranked lower as drivers of business evolution by respondents.
The largest job creation and destruction effects come from environmental, technology and economic trends.
Among the macro trends listed, businesses predict the strongest net job-creation effect to be driven by investments that facilitate the green transition of businesses, the broader application of ESG standards and supply chains becoming more localized, albeit with job growth offset by partial job displacement in each case.
Climate change adaptation and the demographic dividend in developing and emerging economies also rate high as net job creators. Technological advancement through increased adoption of new and frontier technologies and increased digital access are expected to drive job growth in more than half of surveyed companies, offset by expected job displacement in one-fifth of companies. The net job creation effect places these two trends in 6th and 8th place respectively.
The three key drivers of expected net job destruction are slower economic growth, supply shortages and the rising cost of inputs, and the rising cost of living for consumers. Employers also recognize that increased geopolitical divisions and the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will drive labour market disruption – with an even split between employers who expect these trends to have a positive impact and employers who expect them to have a negative impact on jobs.
Within technology adoption, big data, cloud computing and AI feature highly on likelihood of adoption. More than 75% of companies are looking to adopt these technologies in the next five years. The data also shows the impact of the digitalization of commerce and trade. Digital platforms and apps are the technologies most likely to be adopted by the organizations surveyed, with 86% of companies expecting to incorporate them into their operations in the next five years. E-commerce and digital trade are expected to be adopted by 75% of businesses. The second-ranked technology encompasses education and workforce technologies, with 81% of companies looking to adopt these technologies by 2027. The adoption of robots, power storage technology and distributed ledger technologies rank lower on the list. The impact of most technologies on jobs is expected to be a net positive over the next five years. Big data analytics, climate change and environmental management technologies, and encryption and cyber security are expected to be the biggest drivers of job growth. Agriculture technologies, digital platforms and apps, e-commerce and digital trade, and AI are all expected to result in significant labour market disruption, with substantial proportions of companies forecasting job displacement in their organizations, offset by job growth elsewhere to result in a net positive. All but two technologies are expected to be net job creators in the next five years: humanoid robots and non-humanoid robots. Employers anticipate a structural labour market churn of 23% of jobs in the next five years. This can be interpreted as an aggregate measure of disruption, constituting a mixture of emerging jobs added and declining jobs eliminated. Respondents to this year’s Future of Jobs Survey expect a higher-than-average churn in the Supply Chain and Transportation and Media, Entertainment and Sports industries, and lower-than-average churn in Manufacturing as well as Retail and Wholesale of Consumer Goods. Of the 673 million jobs reflected in the dataset in this report, respondents expect structural job growth of 69 million jobs and a decline of 83 million jobs. This corresponds to a net decrease of 14 million jobs, or 2% of current employment. The human-machine frontier has shifted, with businesses introducing automation into their operations at a slower pace than previously anticipated. Organizations today estimate that 34% of all business-related tasks are performed by machines, with the remaining 66% performed by humans. This represents a negligible 1% increase in the level of automation that was estimated by respondents to the 2020 edition of the Future of Jobs Survey. This pace of automation contradicts expectations from 2020 survey respondents that almost half (47%) of business tasks would be automated in the following five years. Today, respondents have revised down their expectations for future automation to predict that 42% of business tasks will be automated by 2027. Task automation in 2027 is expected to vary from 35% of reasoning and decision-making to 65% of information and data processing. But while expectations of the displacement of physical and manual work by machines has decreased, reasoning, communicating and coordinating – all traits with a comparative advantage for humans – are expected to be more automatable in the future. Artificial intelligence, a key driver of potential algorithmic displacement, is expected to be adopted by nearly 75% of surveyed companies and is expected to lead to high churn – with 50% of organizations expecting it to create job growth and 25% expecting it to create job losses. The combination of macrotrends and technology adoption will drive specific areas of job growth and decline:
The fastest-growing roles relative to their size today are driven by technology, digitalization and sustainability. The majority of the fastest growing roles are technologyrelated roles. AI and Machine Learning Specialists top the list of fast-growing jobs, followed by Sustainability Specialists, Business Intelligence Analysts and Information Security Analysts. Renewable Energy Engineers, and Solar Energy Installation and System Engineers are relatively fast-growing roles, as economies shift towards renewable energy. – The fastest-declining roles relative to their size today are driven by technology and digitalization. The majority of fastest declining roles are clerical or secretarial roles, with Bank Tellers and Related Clerks, Postal Service Clerks, Cashiers and Ticket Clerks, and Data Entry Clerks expected to decline fastest. – Large-scale job growth is expected in education, agriculture and digital commerce and trade. Jobs in the Education industry are expected to grow by about 10%, leading to 3 million additional jobs for Vocational Education Teachers and University and Higher education Teachers. Jobs for agricultural professionals, especially Agricultural Equipment Operators, are expected to see an increase of around 30%, leading to an additional 3 million jobs. Growth is forecast in approximately 4 million digitally enabled roles, such as E-Commerce Specialists, Digital Transformation Specialists, and Digital Marketing and Strategy Specialists.
The largest losses are expected in administrative roles and in traditional security, factory and commerce roles. Surveyed organizations predict 26 million fewer jobs by 2027 in Record-Keeping and Administrative roles, including Cashiers and Ticket Clerks; Data Entry, Accounting, Bookkeeping and Payroll Clerks; and Administrative and Executive Secretaries, driven mainly by digitalization and automation.
Analytical thinking and creative thinking remain the most important skills for workers in 2023. Analytical thinking is considered a core skill by more companies than any other skill and constitutes, on average, 9% of the core skills reported by companies. Creative thinking, another cognitive skill, ranks second, ahead of three self-efficacy skills – resilience, flexibility and agility; motivation and self-awareness; and curiosity and lifelong learning – in recognition of the importance of workers ability to adapt to disrupted workplaces.
Dependability and attention to detail, ranks sixth, behind technological literacy. The core skills top 10 is completed by two attitudes relating to working with others – empathy and active listening and leadership and social influence – as well as quality control.
Employers estimate that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years. Cognitive skills are reported to be growing in importance most quickly, reflecting the increasing importance of complex problem-solving in the workplace. Surveyed businesses report creative thinking to be growing in importance slightly more rapidly than analytical thinking. Technology literacy is the third-fastest growing core skill. Self-efficacy skills rank above working with others, in the rate of increase in importance of skills reported by businesses. The socio-emotional attitudes which businesses consider to be growing in importance most quickly are curiosity and lifelong learning; resilience, flexibility and agility; and motivation and self-awareness. Systems thinking, AI and big data, talent management, and service orientation and customer service complete the top 10 growing skills. While respondents judged no skills to be in net decline, sizable minorities of companies judge reading, writing and mathematics; global citizenship; sensory-processing abilities; and manual dexterity, endurance and precision to be of declining importance for their workers. Six in 10 workers will require training before 2027, but only half of workers are seen to have access to adequate training opportunities today. The highest priority for skills training from 2023-2027 is analytical thinking, which is set to account for 10% of training initiatives, on average.