Provenance
This standalone page was migrated from the February 2026 compendium corpus.
Process-Stack Monopoly
A company or small group of companies holding 90%+ market share in a single critical material, process step, or component within a larger production chain, where no near substitute exists. Distinguished from conventional monopolies by their obscurity — these are mid-stack nodes invisible to traditional analysis. Examples: specialty semiconductor materials, advanced packaging, specific chemical precursors, precision tooling.
Sole-Source Dependency
A condition where a single supplier (often a single facility) produces a critical input with no qualified alternative. In defense procurement, sole-source dependencies are national security vulnerabilities. The DoD’s identification of “single points of failure” in sub-tier suppliers is the institutional recognition of this risk.
Specialty Materials
Materials with extreme purity requirements, proprietary formulations, or process-specific characteristics that cannot be sourced from general commodity markets. In the semiconductor stack, these include photoresists, CMP slurries, specialty gases, and substrate materials. Their strategic importance is disproportionate to their market size.
Process Geography Mismatch
The condition where different stages of a production chain are geographically concentrated in different jurisdictions, creating vulnerability even when individual stages are secure. Example: wafers fabricated in the US but packaged and tested in Taiwan, China, or Malaysia. Disruption at any stage halts the final product regardless of upstream capacity.
Packaging Bottleneck
The concentration of semiconductor advanced packaging and testing (OSAT) in a small number of companies and geographies. ASE (Taiwan, 44.6%), Amkor (US-headquartered but Asian production, 15.2%), and JCET (China, 12%) dominate. China holds approximately 30% of advanced packaging specifically. This is a distinct bottleneck from wafer fabrication that the channel identifies as underappreciated.
Screening Methodology (Proposed)
A systematic approach for identifying process-stack monopolies. Criteria include: (1) 90%+ market share in a specific process step, (2) no qualified alternative supplier, (3) 3+ year lead time to replicate, (4) critical to a strategically important end product, (5) potential for government intervention to protect or acquire. The channel proposes this concept but does not provide a complete methodology.
Material Science Substitution Risk
The possibility that innovations in material science will create alternatives to existing monopoly materials, disrupting the pricing power of process-stack monopolies. ASML’s EUV disrupted prior lithography monopolies, demonstrating that process monopolies are not permanent. This is the primary counterargument to process-stack monopoly durability.