“When you think about the best performing subsector in this market, it's actually quite a surprise that it's the plastics subsector. The Taiwanese plastic sector jumped about 250% so far this year. … These big plastic companies have smaller businesses that make the more sophisticated plastics that are related to the AI supply chain.”
Bloomberg Daybreak: Asia Edition · October 2026
Context
Asked how Taiwan was holding up during the tech selloff, the Bloomberg reporter says the AI build-out depends on many small component makers, which is why obscure suppliers have surged.
Transcript
…we've been talking about, the immediate threat is less compared to how long-term it actually might be seen as a real competitor. But for sure, we're seeing them growing at a very fast pace, and there's so much interest from the investors and from all the other suppliers in the memory space as well.
So I want to get your take on what's going on in Taiwan. We know that obviously that is home to TSMC, the biggest foundry for semiconductors on the planet. How well is the Taiwan market been holding up?
This is one of my most passionate topics because actually the Taiwanese market has been the best performing stock market so far this year, up about 60%. You know, you were so we were also excited about how Korea has been doing well, how Japan has been doing well. But Taiwan has really been quite resilient amid all these global sell-offs that we've recently seen in tech. So, of course, just like the other markets, it has lots of exposure to the AI supply chain. But what makes it so special is that it has a lot of these critical, important small components along the AI supply chain that are just necessary for the build out. So, you're talking about small components like the rail tracks that would hold up the AI data centers. And in fact, the company that made that, the founder of that, actually recently became a billionaire because the share prices jumped so much because all of these AI build-out cannot live without these components. And so, when it comes to hyperstaters spending so much money to make their own ecosystem, that means all of these things that the Taiwanese suppliers are making, whether it's from CPU to…
As I'm listening to you, I'm reminding or being reminded of the film The Graduate, in which they say plastics being really kind of something that the future would embrace, and clearly it has. That movie goes back to the 1960s. Before I let you go, the Bank of Japan has an interest rate decision…
Yes. So the expectation is a whole, but really the focus is on the commentaries around if inflation is actually hitting or continued to be above the Bank of Japan's 2% target. And that's what we're expecting to hear from the Bank of Japan's governor Ueda. For now, actually, today, when you looked…
Winnie, it's always a pleasure. Thank you so very much. I hope you have a restful weekend. Bloomberg's Winnie Su. She covers Asia Stocks from our bureau in Hong Kong. Joining us here on the Daybreak Asia podcast.