Customer service is one of the most important ingredients of the marketing mix for products and services. High quality customer service helps to create customer loyalty. A company would quickly lose business to competitors if under estimating the power of services. Therefore, the service management becomes more focus in foundry business. TSMC is the largest pure foundry service company with 50% of market share in foundry business. Customer partnership service is one of the core competences of TSMC. Long- term partnership is what TSMC treats customers and it¡¦s achieved by the win-win service strategy. There is a fewer paper to study the customer service in semiconductor foundry filed. This thesis is to study customer service strategy of TSMC. Why do chip design companies select TSMC as their major foundry source.

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Universiẗat, Diss.--Darmstadt, 2006.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Economics, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Zugl.: Speyer, Dt. Hochsch. für Verwaltungswiss., Diss., 2007

Zugl.: München, Univ., Diss., 2009

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-144).

Zugl.: Darmstadt, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2009

With its burgeoning energy consumption and emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), China is central to addressing the problem of climate change. As the world leader in GHG emissions for years, China is under tremendous international pressure in the fight against climate change. Focusing on China's coal-to-chemicals industriesa major user of coal and significant contributor to GHG and other emissions in Chinathis thesis seeks to explain how national policies have affected the deployment of coal gasification in China. The data and information for this thesis were mainly collected from interviews with experts from Chinese and U.S. companies, relevant government reports, and other Internet sources. First, I present the current state of energy consumption and the development status of related industries that are applying gasification technologies in China. I then present related policies and pilot projects for the development of gasification technology and analyze how these affect the Chinese gasification market. I analyze factors that have promoted a change in the mode of partnership between foreign firms and Chinese firms (from licensing contracts to joint ventures), and how joint ventures are enabling gasification technology transfer currently. Finally, I argue how the underlying conditions create drivers that promote gasification technology transfer despite China’s weak IP regime. / text

Nowadays business world requires more collaboration along supply chains in order to sustain production, optimize cost structure and speed up delivery. The growing inter twist among supply chainpartners causesnumerous risks whose impacting magnitude and scope are larger than ever before. The risks are not just limited in operations any more but further extend to relationships related aspects. It demonstrates new features that we think should deserve careful investigation. Although supply chain risks and partnerships are great concerns in both academics and industry, the existing literature seldom links them together, and it echoesinadequately upon the new situations happened in the past decade. As such, this research project is made with ambition to improve the understanding of risks in the context of today’s collaborative supply chains where interorganizational linkages are strengthened through partnerships. The research project contains three studies. They constitute an integrated series subjected to the overall research objective. The first study starts with concept building and fundamental notion rethinking of risks in supply chains. We conceptualize supply chain risks into a general form in which risks are integrated into a system capable to reflect the correlation and chain effect among them. Through analytical inference and simulation it is found that the level of collaboration of partners contributes to the resilience of supply chains. It implies that partnerships can positively affect the integration of supply chain risk system, thus enhancing supply chain operations by improved ability in fault recovery.In the following two studies we are concerned with the impacts of different types of risks in supply chains upon companies’ operational performance given the effect of partnerships. The pre risk event effect and post risk event effect of partnerships are investigated in study two and study three respectively. The second study uses survey to research practitioners’ view on the role of supply chain risks and partnerships in supply chain performance. The validated sample of 162 responses reveals that the depth of partnerships imposes the most significant impact on supply chain risks and the collaboration risks are considered the top risk type that can influence supply chain performance to the most extent. The third study focuses on the negative consequence brought to the companies by supply chain risks when they have been realized. Event study is employed as the research methodology to identify and analyzethe effects of different risks under different partnerships. With respect to impact analysis, relationship risks are shown to cause the most significant loss to firm value. Moreover, deeper partnerships are found to have more negative impact on firm value resulted from relationship risks. This research project could contribute to the supply chain risk management literature by furthering the understanding of the important role of supply chain risks in enhancing the company’svalue and operational performance. The findings uncover the crucialrelationship between partnerships and supply chain risks, offering a novel view from a risk perspective to explain why an increasing number of supply chain companies are consciously engaged in partnerships nowadays. They may confer academicians and industrial practitioners with some new insights for risk management in supply chains and encouragefuture research in this area. / published_or_final_version / Business / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy