US President-elect Donald Trump has accused Taiwan of “stealing” his country's chip industry. But Taiwan's largest chip company is confident the Trump administration will proceed to fund its projects within the United States

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Under Joe Biden's administration, $6.6 billion was promised CHIPS and Science Act to assist construct three state-of-the-art chip factories in Arizona as a part of the U.S. effort Onshore chip manufacturing.

TSMC Chief Financial Officer Wendell Huang said in an exclusive interview with CNBC's Emily Tan that funding is anticipated to proceed to be phased in under Trump as factories reach construction and production milestones.

“In fact, we have already received the first government support in the fourth quarter,” Haung said, revealing that the contract chipmaker received $1.5 billion in funding.

After some production delays, the primary manufacturing plant in Arizona began producing advanced chips within the fourth quarter of last yr, Huang said. He added that construction of two plants in Arizona is on target and the second plant is anticipated to be accomplished Ready for operation in 2028.

TSMCs first investment in Arizona was announced in May 2020, with the corporate's total investment in its three projects there ultimately exceeding $65 billion.

Much of the investment was committed after the Biden administration signed the bipartisan CHIPS Act in August 2022 almost $53 billion to take a position within the domestic semiconductor supply chain and counter China.

While the brand new president can be expected to make competition with China and outsourcing manufacturing a priority in his second term, there was debate over whether Trump and the Republican-led House of Representatives would revisit the CHIPS Act.

During his campaign for the White House, Trump publicly criticized the bill and its price tag, arguing as a substitute that tariffs were a simpler strategy for onshore chip manufacturing. The president-elect also accused Taiwan of “stealing” US chip deals.

However, industry experts told CNBC that they expect Trump to go away the policy mostly unchanged due to bipartisan support in Washington.

TSMC reported record fourth-quarter profit on Thursday, sending its shares up nearly 4%, on strong demand for its AI chips. Shares closed 1.36% higher on Friday.

In an earnings call following the outcomes, CEO and Chairman CC Wei highlighted TSMC's “long-standing and positive relationship” with the U.S. government, in addition to the commitment and support the corporate has received on the federal, state and city levels.

“I assure you that we have very open and frank communication with the current government and also the future government,” he said in response to an investor query.

On Thursday, Wei also said the corporate wouldn’t attend Trump's inauguration, preferring to maintain a low profile.

The rapidly increasing demand for a category of weight reduction and diabetes drugs has Eli Lilly to latest heights last yr. But the pharmaceutical company has way more plans to make use of this hard-won success, outgoing CFO Anat Ashkenazi told CNBC.

Ashkenazi becomes latest CFO of alphabet on July 31, was critical in managing the unexpected surge in sales and the wave of investor optimism stemming from Eli Lilly's diabetes injection Mounjaro and recently launched obesity drug Zepbound. Ashkenazi took over as CFO at Eli Lilly in 2021 after working on the pharmaceutical giant for about twenty years. She was named to CNBC's inaugural Changemakers list earlier this yr.

“You have to really study the business well and know it inside and out and understand the industry,” she said in an interview with CNBC before announcing her departure. “Only by understanding the entire system can we navigate it well and add value… That's my role as CFO.”

Her tenure was not without challenges: Eli Lilly and rival Novo Nordisk Both struggled to provide large enough quantities of their drugs to fulfill unprecedented demand, resulting in a nationwide shortage of those drugs.

Their weekly injections belong to a category of medicine called GLP-1 agonists, which mimic certain hormones produced within the gut to suppress an individual's appetite and regulate their blood sugar. Some analysts expect the marketplace for these drugs 100 billion US dollars until the top of the last decade.

Eli Lilly's sales boom has enabled the corporate to speculate heavily in expanding production, which could ultimately put more medicines into the hands of patients, Ashkenazi said.

“As we start selling products and generate the revenue and cash flow associated with that sale,” the corporate desires to “direct that cash flow back into the business to invest in those manufacturing facilities,” she said.

Eli Lilly doesn’t expect to maintain up with demand, Ashkenazi said at a conference in March. But the pharmaceutical giant has made encouraging progress to date.

Ashkenazi said Eli Lilly has several manufacturing facilities either under construction or within the “build-out phase,” including two in North Carolina, two in Indiana, one in Ireland and one in Germany. The company also recently acquired a seventh site from Nexus Pharmaceuticals. Eli Lilly also announced late last month that it could invest a further $5.3 billion in its Lebanon, Indiana, manufacturing facility.

These facilities complement the corporate's “existing, very large” manufacturing presence within the U.S. and Europe, Ashkenazi said. Since 2020, Eli Lilly has spent greater than $18 billion to construct, expand and buy manufacturing facilities in those regions, the corporate said in May.

Ashkenazi noted that Eli Lilly can also be addressing one other barrier to patient access: limited insurance coverage for weight-loss drugs within the U.S.

Some employers and other health insurers are still hesitant to cover GLP-1 weight reduction drugs because they’re too expensive and will put a big strain on their budget. Insurers also produce other questions, akin to how long patients actually take the treatments.

However, Ashkenazi said Zepbound's coverage by U.S. private insurers is improving. As of April 1, private coverage is about 67%. Eli Lilly is working to offer access to the remaining patients, she noted.

“It’s not enough to have a highly effective, safe drug that can really transform people’s healthcare – you also have to make it accessible,” Ashkenazi said.

She also hopes that reimbursement for weight-loss drugs will eventually be expanded for patients enrolled in the federal government's Medicare program as Eli Lilly and other pharmaceutical firms exhibit their ability to treat a big selection of obesity-related diseases.

Eli Lilly is studying tirzepatide, the energetic ingredient in Zepbound and Mounjaro, in patients with obesity and fatty liver disease, obstructive sleep apnea, chronic kidney disease and heart failure, in addition to other health conditions.

Under latest guidelines issued in March, Medicare Part D plans can cover obesity treatments that receive regulatory approval for a further health profit. Medicare prescription drug plans, administered by private insurers and generally known as Part D, currently cannot cover these drugs for weight reduction alone.

A much bigger problem, in line with Ashkenazi, is the long-standing misconception that obesity is a “lifestyle choice” and never a chronic disease.

Eli Lilly is trying to vary that.

“Our goal is to make sure that society, the health care system and the patients themselves actually recognize and understand that this is a chronic disease … and therefore should be treated as such,” Ashkenazi said.

Alphabet Outgoing CFO Ruth Porat spent the last 12 months and a half helping her web company navigate the boom in generative artificial intelligence. The one who was just named as her successor was as much as her neck in a really different phenomenon: anti-obesity drugs.

Alphabet announced on Wednesday that Eli Lilly Chief Financial Officer Anat Ashkenazi will turn into the brand new CFO after a virtually year-long search. During that point, Ashkenazi has managed the books of the world's most useful pharmaceutical company, which has struggled to take care of supplies because of such high demand for weight-loss drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound.

“Hundreds of thousands of people fill prescriptions for Mounjaro and Zepbound, but we understand the frustration of those who face delays in prescription dispensing or uncertainty in the delivery of their medicines,” Ashkenazi said on Eli Lilly's first-quarter earnings call in April.

The two drugs belong to a category of treatments called GLP-1s which have gained popularity lately because of their effectiveness in weight reduction. The drugs, which also treat diabetes, work by mimicking a hormone produced within the gut to suppress an individual's appetite. About one in eight adults within the U.S. have used a GLP-1, based on one study. Survey published last Month by the health policy research organization KFF.

Eli Lilly shares have risen 90% over the past 12 months and are trading at a record price. The company reported better-than-expected leads to April and raised its full-year forecast.

“In her last three years as CFO of Lilly, we have experienced tremendous growth and laid the foundation for reaching even more patients with our medicines,” said Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks in a Press release On Wednesday.

Ashkenazi, who spent the last 23 years at Eli Lilly, is moving from the pharmaceutical giant's Indiana headquarters to the San Francisco Bay Area at the tip of July – at an equally crucial time for Google. The finance department is grappling with a restructuring that affects all the company as Google prioritizes investments in AI to maintain pace with a rapidly evolving market.

Porat takes on a brand new role as President and Chief Investment Officer at Alphabet, nine years after Morgan StanleyShe and Ashkenazi will each report back to CEO Sundar Pichai.

Alphabet didn’t reply to CNBC's request for an interview with Ashkenazi.

Ashkenazi, 51, began her profession in Israel within the financial services sector, and when she joined Eli Lilly in 2001, she got here through a enterprise capital division focused on healthcare technology.

On her strategy to CFO in 2021, Ashkenazi was chief financial officer for global divisions, including manufacturing and research and development, and served as chief strategy officer. She took over as head of the finance department after then-CFO John Smiley resigned after he was accused of getting an inappropriate relationship with an worker, and he lost thousands and thousands in bonuses and stock awards.

When she was promoted, Ashkenazi noticed one frustrating point: She was the one female CFO within the biopharma sector. Her path had been relatively easy, she told CNBC in a 2022 interview. She had moved to the U.S. from Israel over twenty years ago and got here from a really different culture where gender inequality was less of a difficulty. Being the one woman on the table didn’t deter her.

“I don't care,” Ashkenazi said. “But not everyone has that attitude, especially in the Midwest.”

Ashkenazi said on the CFO Thought Leader podcast last 12 months that she spent five years in numerous parts of the organization, the business from different perspectives.

“This experience has broadened my scope of expertise,” she said.

According to public records, Ashkenazi holds a master's degree in business administration from Tel Aviv University and a bachelor's degree in economics and business administration from the Hebrew University.

Founded in 1876, Eli Lilly has long been considered one of the biggest pharmaceutical corporations within the United States. The company is understood for introducing the antidepressant Prozac within the Nineteen Eighties and Cymbalta about 20 years later.

However, the previous few years have been a period of historic growth for Eli Lilly because of the explosive popularity of GLP-1. Sales of the diabetes drug Mounjaro, which was in its first first full 12 months in the marketplace and the rapid launch of the newly approved weight-loss injection product Zepbound helped Eli Lilly's sales rise 20% to $34 billion last 12 months, the strongest growth since 1990, based on FactSet.

This success, together with the potential of highly anticipated drugs similar to the Alzheimer's drug donanemab, pushed Eli Lilly's market capitalization up to almost $800 billion, making the corporate the biggest pharmaceutical company by market capitalization.

As demand for its weight-loss and diabetes treatments outstrips supply, many patients are struggling to seek out the drugs. Ashkenazi said on a conference call in February that the corporate had doubled its production capability for its incretin drugs by the tip of 2023, thanks partially to considered one of its latest facilities in North Carolina.

Eli Lilly also announced 2.5 billion US dollars to open a production facility for injectable products in Germany and to moreover 1.6 billion US dollars to construct two latest production facilities in its home state of Indiana.

“Our manufacturing organization continues to successfully execute the most ambitious expansion program in our company’s long history,” Ashkenazi said within the conference call.

This will not be the primary time Ashkenazi has needed to oversee a fast-paced production.

In 2020, the Trump administration announced an agreement to buy Eli Lilly’s Covid-19 antibody treatment as a part of the Department of Health’s “Operation Warp Speed.” The next 12 months, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stopped One of Lilly's Covid-19 antibody treatments, bamlanivimab, notes that therapy alone may not work well against variants.

Ashkenazi said on the CFO podcast that Eli Lilly entered the Covid testing market to attempt to ramp up production at a time when it was urgently needed.

“We are not a medical device manufacturer, nor are we a hospital,” Askhenazi said. “But we decided to step in at our own expense and set up a testing facility in the basement of our building.”

Ashkenazi also helped digitize some research in the course of the pandemic and expanded predictive analytics for manufacturing and sales.

“We didn't stop there,” she said. “We decided to develop therapeutics and antibody treatments for Covid, which were outside of our business.”

Ashkenazi has needed to take care of loads of public pressure along the way in which. Last 12 months, when whistleblowers and government groups criticized the high prices of recent obesity drugs which have been life-saving for some people, Eli Lilly announced Price reductions of 70% for probably the most commonly prescribed insulins and the expansion of a program that caps patient co-payments for insulin at $35 monthly.

An Eli Lilly spokesperson said the $35 program existed under Medicare Part D before this announcement.

In April, Eli Lilly reached a $13.5 million settlement with insulin drug buyers. scrapped after a judge refused to permit a category motion lawsuit within the case.

Last 12 months, Eli Lilly accomplished a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former worker alleging manufacturing problems and faulty practices in pricing diabetes drugs and insulin. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation into an Eli Lilly plant in New Jersey for alleged manufacturing practices and data falsification. The FDA found additional deficiencies on the plant last 12 months, Reuters reported in January.

At Alphabet, Ashkenazi inherits a set of equally big but very different challenges.

The company's core promoting business is on the mend after a difficult 2023, when corporations drastically cut promoting spending to address rising inflation and macroeconomic concerns.

Revenue rose 15% in the primary quarter, the fastest growth since early 2022. The company announced its first dividend and a $70 billion buyback program. The stock price is up 26% this 12 months and is trading near its all-time high.

But the corporate has been on the defensive for much of the past 18 months after OpenAI's ChatGPT launched in late 2022, catching Google by surprise and sparking investor concern that buyers might soon have latest ways to seek out information online. Google responded with a series of generative AI product launches that were criticized as rushed, and in some cases the corporate needed to backtrack because of glitches.

Although Alphabet is considered one of the biggest corporations on the planet, it stays a founder-controlled company. Larry Page and Sergey Brin own shares, based on the most recent Proxy submission.

Ashkenazi also comes at a time of cultural change at an organization that was known for top salaries, extravagant perks and a vibrant corporate culture in its early a long time. Employees have recently expressed frustration with declining morale tied to the corporate's continued cost-cutting, despite record profits and orders to return to the office after the pandemic.

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