1.5 billion cell phones were sold in 2018. This represents 20% of the world population, assuming a negligible number of people buy two phones in the same calendar year.
Between 1.4 and 1.5 billion cell phones were sold in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 (projected), representing roughly another 6 billion cell phones. That is, there is roughly one cell phone per person in the world "created after 2017."
Obviously, a significant number of people bought more than one cell phone in that time period; but, offsetting that, the average cellphone is sold more than once due to the used market. While it's hard to project this to actual estimate saturation of cell phones "created after 2017", it's very hard to imagine a case that the 6 billion phones from 2019 on don't represent at least another 10% of the population.
There is also advanced hardware besides cell phones.
Less than 30% of the world population owning hardware created after 2017 doesn't pass the sniff test.
The comment I was replying to was about advanced devices in general, not specifically TSMC.
That said, MediaTek is not the greatest example here -- they're fabless, and most of what they design is fabbed by, you guessed it, TSMC. The better counter-example would be Samsung, who fabs at least some of their own chips.
Arguably a lot of people might interact with servers that use their chips (and cpus and nvidia gpus), plus there’s game consoles which are fairly popular.
It's not about game consoles, it's about cell phones. According to some estimates, 83% of the world's population has a smartphone. TSMC makes a significant portion of the chips powering those phones. Currently TSMC has a significant performance lead over all the other fabs.
> most expensive part of gadgets nearly everyone has
I think that's where your assumption might be flawed. It's the most expensive part for PREMIUM offerings on the market that command high price points (e.g. iPhone, AMD Server chips, etc).
The everyday person, globally, can't afford such luxury items.
Which really doesn't seem like much for the company that makes the most expensive part of gadgets nearly everyone has.