Column: South Korea's semiconductor strategy faces foresight and structural gaps

South Korea’s fragmented semiconductor policymaking reveals a structural flaw: overlapping mandates from MOTIE, MSIT, and the Presidential Office generate strategic noise rather than synergy. Amid surging demand for AI chips and advanced packaging, this discoordination delays ecosystem integration in critical areas like EUV lithography and HBM, reducing supplier responsiveness. Companies face escalating compliance burdens and duplicated R&D costs, especially as U.S. and EU chip subsidies pressure supply chain localization. TSMC and other Taiwan, China foundries are capitalizing by locking in NVIDIA and AMD through CoWoS capacity expansions, while mainland China accelerates mature-node self-sufficiency, eroding Korean memory dominance. Without a unified cross-ministerial tech governance body within the next 18 months, South Korea risks missing its strategic window in the logic-memory convergence race.