Huang Mingzhang, an analyst at DIGITIMES Research, said that as many semiconductor fabs are set to grab silicon wafer capacity in 2017, silicon wafer suppliers are more willing to sign long-term contracts of two to three years and share their technology and products Blueprint for development as a preferential allocation of production capacity standard is expected that the silicon wafer manufacturers in 2018 is expected to hit a record high in nearly 10 years.
Shin-Etsu Chemical, which still ranks the top spot in terms of sales of semiconductor silicon wafers, continued to outperform its peers in other sectors. Sumco, another Japanese maker, is closely following the global wafer Completion of merger of US SunEdison (the fourth largest vendor in the market) in 2016 will see a significant increase in production capacity and revenue. In the third quarter of 2017, the profit margin has already surpassed Sumco and is currently the third largest silicon wafer supplier in the world Business
The fourth-largest company, Siltronic, is the German company, whose average selling price of silicon wafers is higher than that of Shin-Etsu and Sumco and has the biggest advantage of expanding up to 12-inch silicon wafers. The five largest suppliers of silicon wafer sales accounted for more than 90%.
Huang Mingzhang pointed out that due to the shadow of the long-term oversupply is still in progress, in order to ensure the prosperity of the industry, the expansion plan for silicon wafer manufacturers to take more gradual approach.In addition, there are also investment to expand production funds from the client advances mode, according to the current Expansion plans, it is expected that by 2019, the semiconductor silicon wafer supply continued to be tight chance of still large, second-tier semiconductor plant is more unfavorable.