On December 9, a letter of intent for cooperation of the silicon industrial base project led by BOE with a total investment of over 10 billion yuan was signed in China and became one of the nearly trillion yuan investment projects of China Semiconductor in the past two years. Under the background of long-term and large-scale reliance on imports from the Chinese semiconductor industry, the development of related industries has received the attention of the relevant state departments. However, due to frequent overseas government obstruction by overseas mergers and acquisitions, the development of its own semiconductor technology becomes even more important. In the eyes of people in the industry, in addition to the need for financial support, the semiconductor industry in China needs more talented people.
Trillion investment
The letter of intent for cooperation of the 10 billion yuan silicon industrial base project was jointly signed by Xi'an High-tech Zone, Beijing Core Energy Company and Beijing Haosiwei Company. According to the letter of intent, the project was planned and promoted in stages by Beijing Yusiwei, a company owned by Beijing Core Energy Company.
Beijing Core Energy Investment Management Co., Ltd. was established in 2015 by BOE Technology Group Co., Ltd., National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Co., Ltd., Beijing Yizhuang International Industry Investment Management Co., Ltd. and professional teams. In order to implement the “Outline for Promoting the Development of the National IC Industry†and combine with the existing integrated circuit industry in Xi'an High-tech Zone, Beijing Yusiwei Technology Co., Ltd. is planning to make full use of its own advantages to land the silicon material industry project and improve the integrated circuit industry chain in Xi'an High-tech Zone. To fill the gaps in the country.
In fact, the aforementioned silicon industrial base project is just a microcosm of the development of China's semiconductor industry in recent years. Since 2015, China's semiconductor industry has seen a new upsurge in its development. The investment in the construction of new and newly-built wafer fabs is nearly trillion yuan, of which a large amount of money is invested in equipment purchases.
On the 6th of this month, Anhui's first 12-inch wafer foundry company and Hefei's first billion-grade integrated circuit project, Hefei Jinghe Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd., went into mass production. Hefei Jinghe, with a total investment of 12.81 billion yuan, began laying the ground on October 20, 2015, and completed trial production on June 28, 2017. The first batch of wafers was formally rolled off in mid-July and production has now been achieved. By the end of this year, 3000 pieces of monthly production capacity will be achieved, and it is expected to reach a monthly production capacity of 40,000 pieces in 2018. Hefei Jinghe is also expected to become the world's largest manufacturer focusing on panel-driven chips.
In the past two years, a total of 17 12-inch semiconductor factories have been built in the world. This is an unprecedented investment in the semiconductor industry. There are 10 companies located in mainland China. In the same period, Japan and South Korea only added one production line each.
Since March of this year, at least five semiconductor 12-inch plants have been launched in mainland China, including Wuhan Xinxin Phase II, US 12G semiconductor Chongqing Chongqing 12-inch power semiconductor fab, Hefei Changxin 12-inch DRAM factory, and TSMC Nanjing Crystal. The Circle Foundry, Dikema Huai'an 12-inch factory, etc., China will become the largest site of the global semiconductor 12-inch plant.
According to the data released by the International Semiconductor Equipment Materials Industry Association (SEMI), by 2020, there will be 62 new wafer fabs worldwide, 26 of which will be located in China, accounting for 42% of the total. The all-embracing semiconductor factory, reportedly a 50-million-inch 12-inch wafer production line, will need to invest 45 billion yuan. In this case, the total investment will be in the order of trillions of yuan.
Industrial pain
In daily life, everything from mobile phones, computers, home appliances and medical care to automobiles, high-speed rail, aircraft and aerospace can not be separated from the “heart†of semiconductors (chips). The data shows that China's annual semiconductor consumption accounts for nearly one-third of the world's total shipments, but China's semiconductor output accounts for only 6%-7% of the world's total. Many imported chips are assembled on personal computers, smart phones, and other devices, and then exported overseas.
However, there is still a huge gap between the number of semiconductors produced by Chinese chip makers and the number of semiconductors consumed by China itself. According to customs statistics, in 2016, the import of integrated circuits was 342.55 billion pieces, a year-on-year increase of 9.1%; the import value was USD 227.07 billion, which was a year-on-year decrease of 1.2%. In the same period, China’s crude oil imports were only RMB 60.8 billion. China's spending on semiconductor chip imports is already nearly double that of crude oil.
ICInsights expects that the top ten global semiconductor sales in 2017 (not including foundries) are: Samsung, Intel, Hynix, Micron, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Nvidia and NXP. It is estimated that in 2017, the top ten semiconductor companies will occupy 58.5% of the global semiconductor market share, which is the highest since 1993.
Peng Hongbing, deputy director of the Electronic Division of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that China must reduce its dependence on semiconductor chip imports. During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, relevant departments provided domestic semiconductor companies with financial support or assisted in the acquisition of international giants through direct investment in semiconductor industry investment funds.
Since 2014, China has attempted to acquire technological practices by acquiring foreign semiconductor companies, such as the acquisition of ISSI and OmniVision, but the overwhelming majority of foreign governments have Ambitions are very vigilant and it is very difficult for Chinese capital to acquire foreign IC companies.
In February 2016, the United States Fairchild rejected two Chinese buyers, China Resources Microelectronics and China Venture Capital, for a $2.6 billion acquisition offer, and instead chose US ON Semiconductor, which has a lower bid than Chinese companies. The reason given by the company is that it is worried that the US regulatory authorities will stop the transaction. In the same month, Ziguang Group’s Ziguang Group announced that it had decided to terminate its purchase of Western Digital’s US storage company’s Western Digital for US$3.775 billion. The U.S. Overseas Investment Committee needs to be involved in the review.
In December 2016, China Fujian Hongxin Fund issued a statement on its website to withdraw its offer for the German semiconductor company Aishong and refunded the previously purchased Aisheon stocks, although the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs withdrew its grant to Fujian, China. The core fund received 6.7 billion euros in the purchase order of Aisik Corporation. However, some media said that the U.S. government has played a crucial role in blocking this transaction.
Therefore, in recent years, as China's overseas mergers and acquisitions in semiconductors have been blocked, the construction of domestic self-contained semiconductors is also in full swing. In March of this year, at the site of the Xiaomi S1 chip conference, Lei Jun broke ground and publicly appealed to Zhongguancun, Haidian District, Beijing Municipal Government to give Xiaomi more support.
Change of pattern
Looking back, in the past, the global semiconductor industry experienced two major industrial shifts. One was from Europe and the United States to Japan, and the other from Japan to South Korea and China Taiwan. In a large-scale transfer, a large number of excellent semiconductor companies emerged, such as Texas. Instruments, Samsung, LG, TSMC, and even MediaTek, etc. Until now, these companies still hold the lifeblood of the global chip industry, and their process capability has increased year by year.
However, according to industry analysts, in the era of 5G/6G, humans will have a geometric growth in their requirements for computing speed. Not only will there be huge demand for productivity, but everything will be installed on electronic products, tools, and buildings. There is a huge increase in the speed and complexity of operations. The chip is a bigger market than the smart phone. The formerly veteran enterprises must improve their own craftsmanship, and at the same time, a large number of emerging enterprises must emerge.
The most important policy goal during the 13th Five-Year Plan period is that the domestic self-sufficiency ratio of core basic components and key basic materials will reach 40% in 2020 and further increase to 70% in 2025. In view of the fact that domestic self-sufficiency in the domestic market for ICs is less than 20% in 2015, there is still much room for development.
Taking the mobile phone chip market as an example, several major manufacturers such as Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Spreadtrum currently occupy most of the market share. MediaTek and Qualcomm have accumulated many years of experience in mobile phone chips. Qualcomm has always had an absolute advantage in the high-end market to suppress MediaTek. MediaTek has a huge market share in the mid- and low-end mobile phone market, especially those of unknown mobile phone manufacturers. select. Of course, market share is not just for no reason. In the past 30 years, Qualcomm invested more than US$44 billion in R&D, and applied for and owned more than 130,000 patents worldwide.
In recent years, mobile phone manufacturers have also independently developed chips. In addition to Apple's A-series chips and Samsung's Exynos, Huawei's Kirin also has this research and development capability. The Kirin 970 chip independently developed by Huawei this year not only excels in performance, but also surpasses Snapdragon 835 in the running sub-link. Although it only wins with a slight advantage, for the first time AI Kirin has more possibilities. In the first half of this year, the millet S1 chip was also officially released.
"The reason why all mobile phone manufacturers have always chosen Qualcomm, MediaTek and other manufacturers of chip products, in part because the mobile phone chip manufacturers are basically not for sale, including Huawei and Xiaomi, if these companies open the market in the future, sell chips, Qualcomm and The monopoly of MediaTek, Spreadtrum and other companies will certainly be broken,†said Wu Chunyong, CEO of Fusion.
However, Wu Chunyong also pointed out that China still faces the challenge of shortage of talents in the chip industry. In the past 30 years, despite the accumulation of a large number of manufacturing engineers and operations management personnel, it lacks sufficient talent pool in high-tech areas, and is the strongest in the world. The University of Science and Technology is still located in Europe and the United States. According to statistics, in 2017, there were about 140,000 employees in China's chip design industry, generating revenue of 194.6 billion yuan, and the per capita output value of 1.39 million yuan, about 210,000 dollars, which is relatively high per capita output value in recent years. In contrast, in fiscal year 2016, Qualcomm’s 30,500 employees generated revenues of US$22.3 billion and their per capita output value was US$731,000, which is 3.5 times that of Chinese employees.
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