In a further attempt to focus on advanced systems, the company decided to sell the manufacturing operation to Solectron, the world's largest contract maker of electronics, for $900 million.
It's cultivating the semiconductor design industry, believing that local houses will turn to nearby contract-makers for manufacturing services.
Another is Seeed Studio, a contract manufacturer for makers, as the world's ever-growing crowd of tinkerers is called.
In Taiwan, HTC was feted in the local media as the little company that could — the former contract maker now on the big stage for its innovation.
Ovivo Inc has been awarded a C$8 million contract to design and supply modular fresh water makers for an offshore oil production platform located in the North Sea.
TSMC -- a flagship of Taiwan's technology economy with revenue last year of nearly $6 billion and the pacesetter for global contract microchip makers -- cannot afford to stand still.
Take, for example, the sprawling 250-acre operation of FAPS, which has the contracts for makers including Ferrari, Honda, Mazda, Nissan and Volvo.
One potential suitor that keeps popping up in the rumor mill is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's largest contract chip maker, and for good reason.
China continues to invest in contract chip makers as well.
Essentially, Advanced Technology has bought scale and capacity -- the two most prized possessions for a contract chip maker.
The method of defining the utility function can be briefly described as follows: the decision maker (for example, a contract engineer, building site manager) is faced with a choice between a certitude of a given result (a monetary value), and a lottery was to extreme results.
