I have an anecdote possibly related to this. I work for a semiconductor company and we were in pretty good standing with TSMC. All of a sudden we were informed we should longer contact the usual engineers them and a new team of engineers was assigned to us. It was very clear the new staff was their B-team. Rumor around the office the A-team went to support Apple.
The word I learned in years past because of Apple that applies to it in several ways is "monopsony": the ability to control the market for a product by being the dominant buyer of same.
That is not what monopsony means. Monopsony means there is only one buyer. Apple is one of many buyers. However, they are able to secure the resources since they can pay the most.
Of course they’ve been accused in the Supreme Court of being a monopsonist with regard to the App Store, but that’s a separate discussion.
(Update: regrettably my economic theory is weak, so while I think it makes sense to apply the term, after more reading I can't argue the case with a reasonable level of conviction.
Certainly there should be some way to describe a buyer who locks up a supply of components to the exclusion of competitors, as Apple has done on multiple occasions dating at least to the original iPod hard drives.)
See the box at the top of article showing difference between monopoly, monopsony, oligopoly, oligopsony.
A monopsony would mean the buyer gets to dictate all the terms, and the seller has to sell at very low price. In this case, TSMC has something very valuable, and Apple is paying a considerable amount (presumably, I haven’t seen real numbers) to the seller to make sure no one else gets it.
In fact, TSMC is a monopoly, the only seller of a much sought after product.
