TAIPEI – When Vietnamese postgraduate student Le Tan Vinh was looking to study abroad for his master’s degree, Taiwan was a no-brainer. 

Besides being offered a full scholarship, the 28-year-old said he would benefit from exposure to cutting-edge semiconductor research and development.

“Taiwan is one of the few places that offer generous scholarships for Vietnamese students, and that’s a very big factor for us,” said Mr Vinh, who graduated with a master’s degree in electrophysics from Taiwan’s National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in 2021. 

“Taiwan is also famous when it comes to semiconductors, so I decided it was the best choice,” he told The Straits Times.

He is now pursuing a PhD at the International College of Semiconductor Technology at the same university, and plans to find a job in the island’s chip sector in the future.

Taiwan hopes to welcome more people like Mr Vinh as it steps up efforts to attract international students – especially those from South-east Asia – to make up for its shrinking university enrolment numbers amid a falling birth rate.

In 2023, Taiwan’s total fertility rate was 0.865, among the world’s lowest.

In particular, the island is looking southwards for prospective tertiary students in the hope that they could be trained to fill the shortage of high-tech talent in the critical semiconductor industry, where Taiwan is a leading producer, manufacturing over 90 per cent of the world’s most advanced chips. 

A 2023 report by Taiwan’s largest job search platform, 104 Job Bank, said the average number of monthly job openings in the local chip sector in the second quarter of 2023 was 23,000. 

This comes as the output of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is expected to reach NT$4.17 trillion (S$174 billion) in 2024, an increase of 13.6 per cent from the year before, amid advances in new technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, said Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry.

“The need for skilled workers continues to grow as the demand for chips has increased. But Taiwan could face delays in chip production and innovation if the sector does not meet its workforce demand,” said Ms Zoey Hsu, a Taipei-based semiconductor expert at tech research firm Counterpoint Research. 

The competition for talent in Taiwan’s chip industry is part of a global crunch. 

According to a 2022 report by Deloitte, the semiconductor industry in the United States will have a shortage of about 70,000 to 90,000 workers over the next few years, while South Korea needs 30,000 over the next decade.

Meanwhile, China had a shortage of 300,000 even before the current spike in chip demand, the report said.

The stakes are particularly high for Taiwan. 

Some analysts have argued that the island’s status as the top producer of semiconductors gives it a “silicon shield” and protects it against an invasion from Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its territory and has not ruled out the use of force to “reunify” with it.